The nefarious Noughties are over as of 12:01 this morning - a welcome end to what most Americans consider the worst decade in 50 years, according to a recent Pew Research Poll.
The debate is now on, of course, as to how to pronounce the year we're living in. Some experts suggest that we used the "two-thousand-and" formulation to pronounce the years 2000-2009 mainly due to the influence of the 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey" (which also used the "two-thousand-and" formulation). This issue was discussed briefly on NPR two months ago:
The debate is now on, of course, as to how to pronounce the year we're living in. Some experts suggest that we used the "two-thousand-and" formulation to pronounce the years 2000-2009 mainly due to the influence of the 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey" (which also used the "two-thousand-and" formulation). This issue was discussed briefly on NPR two months ago:
SIEGEL: And then what? What do we call the year that kicks in when the ball comes down? The four digits, 2-0-1-0, are not in dispute, but how we say them evidently is. Is it two-thousand ten or twenty-ten? We've checked our own airwaves, and we find them to be, as you might expect, impeccably balanced.Personally, "twenty-ten" still doesn't sound right. I think it'll be "two-thousand-" for me until at least 2013 or so. I'm gonna propose right now, though, that we call this decade the "two-thousand-teens" (say it fast). Not too original, but it has a nice ring to it.[...]Mr.LASSER: I think when you put the year, when it's describing something, like the nineteen-eighty-five Bears, the fiercest team ever, if you're when the year is describing a noun, I think you can go into the truncated version. So if you said the twenty-ten Nike super shoe, like that's fine, but when you talk about the year on itself, like a noun, like a proper noun, like a person, like a citizen, it would be two-thousand and ten.
SIEGEL: As in the great twenty-ten controversy. What shall we call the year two-thousand ten?
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