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pseydtonneThe assault of decade's end media pieces and top-ten lists is well underway. I've noticed many of these articles are acting like this is the end of the first decade of 21st Century. Even the Boston Globe is party to this.
Since all of these reviewers were alive and at least of high-school age 9.95 years ago, I didn't expect I'd have to teach this. However, here we go:
The Age of Lots of People's Lord (Anni Domani, aka the Common Era) began with a Year One, not a Year Zero. This is because there wasn't a popular concept of zero until about 700 years later. Thus each century begins on a year with a number '01' and ends on a '00'. Thus the Twentieth Century began in 1901 and ended in 2000.
We are used to viewing decades based on their tenths-place names: the Hungry Forties (the 1840s in Europe), the Roaring Twenties, the Flannel-Wearing Nineties. These begin on a zero and end on a nine. Since this decade didn't have a euphonious name (The Aughties), we didn't say willingly it until last week.
We also didn't say the name of this decade much because we just finished turning over a millennium somewhere in there. Since the tumbling of the number counters had more emotional and economic prevalence (aka. Y2K), we almost ignored the last year of the Twentieth Century and called its inception the new millennium (even though this fails our previous definition of centuries, ten of which would make up a millennium).
We've been calling this decade the 21st Century, as if the entire thousand years were encapsulated in nine. We still don't have a nickname for the next ten years.
Rather than just snapping and kvetching that this isn't the end of the first decade of the millennium, that it's only the end of the 200x or the Aughty Murphies, I'd like to ask why we've blocked out the whole 2000 versus 2001 thing enough to have such a problem. We were all there, we were hung up on this then -- how have we forgotten now?
Y2K was a ton of build-up for nothing. If you were a Cobol programmer or a mainframe administrator, Y2K beefed up your retirement portfolio and gave you 18 months of excellent pay. Those folks did their job; therefore, nothing important went wrong. The only significant problem was with chat forum software ringing in the new year of 19100.
As a result, the year 2000 was this relapse. Everyone tried to chill and tune out the lack of an exciting collapse. Then came the post-election debacle followed by 9/11.
Summary: we spent ten months taking a nap. Then we got run so ragged during the autumn of 2001 and well into 2002 that it felt like an entire century passed.
It's been more fun to reflect on 1989. The Berlin Wall fell, Ceaucescu got executed and the Cold War was over. Yay capitalism. The dozen years between the autumn of '89 and the summer of '01 became our version of the Belle Epoque. It wasn't very belle if you lived in Rwanda or the SFRY (States of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia), but it was pimptastic if you lived in Poland or the United States.
Maybe we're all just tired of the crap from needing to open a new millennium, a new century, a visible shift in which nations are running things -- hello China. We've been swimming in dogwater. We're calling to the next decade, invoking it as something better.
This time it does matter what comes next. We were too optimistic before and crushed a lot of good things. This time our hearts are heavy and we're looking for some structure. We'll have to build that structure ourselves, even though we know our great-grandchildren will have to knock it down in 2100. That's fine -- we have to start somewhere. Collapse is pretty but boring. Civilization is about constant rebuilding.
-and merry Christmas
Since all of these reviewers were alive and at least of high-school age 9.95 years ago, I didn't expect I'd have to teach this. However, here we go:
The Age of Lots of People's Lord (Anni Domani, aka the Common Era) began with a Year One, not a Year Zero. This is because there wasn't a popular concept of zero until about 700 years later. Thus each century begins on a year with a number '01' and ends on a '00'. Thus the Twentieth Century began in 1901 and ended in 2000.
We are used to viewing decades based on their tenths-place names: the Hungry Forties (the 1840s in Europe), the Roaring Twenties, the Flannel-Wearing Nineties. These begin on a zero and end on a nine. Since this decade didn't have a euphonious name (The Aughties), we didn't say willingly it until last week.
We also didn't say the name of this decade much because we just finished turning over a millennium somewhere in there. Since the tumbling of the number counters had more emotional and economic prevalence (aka. Y2K), we almost ignored the last year of the Twentieth Century and called its inception the new millennium (even though this fails our previous definition of centuries, ten of which would make up a millennium).
We've been calling this decade the 21st Century, as if the entire thousand years were encapsulated in nine. We still don't have a nickname for the next ten years.
Rather than just snapping and kvetching that this isn't the end of the first decade of the millennium, that it's only the end of the 200x or the Aughty Murphies, I'd like to ask why we've blocked out the whole 2000 versus 2001 thing enough to have such a problem. We were all there, we were hung up on this then -- how have we forgotten now?
Y2K was a ton of build-up for nothing. If you were a Cobol programmer or a mainframe administrator, Y2K beefed up your retirement portfolio and gave you 18 months of excellent pay. Those folks did their job; therefore, nothing important went wrong. The only significant problem was with chat forum software ringing in the new year of 19100.
As a result, the year 2000 was this relapse. Everyone tried to chill and tune out the lack of an exciting collapse. Then came the post-election debacle followed by 9/11.
Summary: we spent ten months taking a nap. Then we got run so ragged during the autumn of 2001 and well into 2002 that it felt like an entire century passed.
It's been more fun to reflect on 1989. The Berlin Wall fell, Ceaucescu got executed and the Cold War was over. Yay capitalism. The dozen years between the autumn of '89 and the summer of '01 became our version of the Belle Epoque. It wasn't very belle if you lived in Rwanda or the SFRY (States of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia), but it was pimptastic if you lived in Poland or the United States.
Maybe we're all just tired of the crap from needing to open a new millennium, a new century, a visible shift in which nations are running things -- hello China. We've been swimming in dogwater. We're calling to the next decade, invoking it as something better.
This time it does matter what comes next. We were too optimistic before and crushed a lot of good things. This time our hearts are heavy and we're looking for some structure. We'll have to build that structure ourselves, even though we know our great-grandchildren will have to knock it down in 2100. That's fine -- we have to start somewhere. Collapse is pretty but boring. Civilization is about constant rebuilding.
-and merry Christmas
