[WEB4LIB] Counting years

[Thomas Dowling]

> On Sat, 1 Jan 2000, Gary E. Masters wrote:
>
> > The more I think of it, the more I see it as just a matter of
definition.
> > OK.  There was no "zero" year.
> > But why not make the first millennium to be 999 years and then start
each
> > following one with the "zero" year?  Makes sense to me.
> >
>
> First, check a reliable reference source, e.g.
> http://psyche.usno.navy.mil/millennium/whenIs.html
> We have had this cite linked from our page of reference sources for
about
> a year and a half now.  For those who need further explanation: when
> counting we start with the number 1, when we reach 100 we have finished
> counting a hundred (or century if counting years).  The second hundred
> starts with 101 add is finished at 200.  Think of money.  If you want to
> count how many dollars worth of pennies you have you finish each
dollar's
> worth when you reach a number ending in 00.  You start each new dollar's
> worth with a number ending in 1.  If you do it differently, I'll gladly
> sell you dollars for pennies, or better yet hundreds for singles ;)
>

I don't know why, but I have little patience with this argument.  The
fallacy here is that there is One Official Millennium and that it's up to
people like the US Naval Observatory to define it.  We don't concern
ourselves about the One Offical Century, and happily refer to both the
1900s and the Twentieth Century, understanding that they aren't quite the
same (I concede that people referring to this as the beginning of the
Twenty-First Century are wrong, but they're probably still hungover from
their millennium parties).   As a contrast, we don't refer to any
century's "Tenth Decade" but to it's "90's," so there's no conflict about
what the official start of a new decade is.

Popular usage does not traditionally give a millennium any name at all, so
it's wrong and pig-headed to start throwing "The Second Millennium" around
in the closing days of 1999 and then browbeating people with it to
convince them that the start of 2000 is less than what they'd like it to
be.

Showing that one millennium starting with a "01" year leads to another
millenium starting with a "01" year is a tautology.  Every moment
concludes a millennium that began 1000 years before, so there's a matter
of defining which millennium you're interested in.  The popular perception
remains that the change from 1999 to 2000 is comparatively important and
that the change from 2000 to 2001 is comparatively unimportant.
Authoritative sources like the Naval Observatory are authoritatively
describing an abstraction that people don't care about.

Take your pick:

  Bimillennial anniversary of Jesus' birth: 1993 or 1994 (per
britannica.com)
  Beginning of the 2xxx millennium: January 1, 2000
  Beginning of notional "Third Millennium": January 1, 2001

To put it another way: I doubt many of my friends will spend all of
December 31, 2000 watching CNN broadcast new year's celebrations around
the world, features on the first baby of 2001 born in Korea, etc. etc.
The big party was last Friday, however logically the USNO can prove it
wasn't the start of the Third Millennium.


Feel free to read
<URL:http://cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999/at2000/stories/2001/index.html>, "The
great millennium misunderstanding: Yes, it does begin in 2001, but only
die-hard purists really care".


Thomas ("Millenarial prediction: Fezzes back in style") Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu