Can we turn the page on "two thousand" next year?
Sooner or later, we have to stop saying “two-thousand” when referring to what year it is. I mean, eventually, we’re going to have start referring to the year as “twenty-something.”
Prince didn’t call for us to “party like it’s one-thousand, nine-hundred, ninety-nine,” did he?
No, he didn’t.
And while I wasn’t around at the time, I’m pretty sure that during the Roosevelt Administration (Teddy, not Franklin), they said the year was “nineteen oh one” (or maybe “nineteen aught one”) not “one thousand, nine hundred, one.”
C’mon, people. I understand why we called it “two thousand.” And I understand why that spilled over into us calling it “two-thousand, one.” Although frankly, an argument could be made that we should have transitioned to calling it “twenty oh one” as early as then — you know, like they called it “nineteen oh one” a century earlier.
Can we call it "twenty ten" next year?
But we continue to cling to this clumsy method of identifying the year even now.
Last week I voiced a client’s script that referred to the year 2010. I read it, “twenty, ten.” The client, who was directing me via phone patch, preferred that I say it, “two thousand, ten.”
Okay, the customer is always right, so I was happy to oblige.
But really, when are we going to stop identifying the year this way?
Will our grandchildren plan to party like it’s two thousand ninety nine? Or twenty ninety-nine?
Will our great-great (insert however many “greats” it takes) grandkids call it two-thousand, one-hundred, sixty-nine? Or twenty-one, sixty-nine? You know, like we said it 1969. Not one-thousand, nine-hundred, sixty-nine, but nineteen sixty-nine.
And what about Zager and Evans? Their 1969 hit song, In the Year 2525, would never have received any airplay if the lyric had been “In the year two-thousand, five hundred, twenty-five.”
I vote that we wean ourselves off of this foolish milleniumspeak fetish starting in January and refer to the year that will be upon us at that time as “twenty ten.”