By Jeffrey the Barak.

(written towards the end of 2009.)

I wonder if we will call this coming year twenty-ten or the more cumbersome two thousand and ten. I think we should have called 2001 twenty-o-one, just like they did in nineteen-o-one and eighteen-o-one. Personally I will from this day make that change, and no longer refer to twenty-o-four, as two-thousand and four.

And what do we call the decade? Is it to be the double-oh’s, the twenty-hundreds, or the uh-oh’s. Well not the twenty-hundreds as that would mean the century, just as the nineteen hundreds refers to a whole century.

It will be The Media that set the course, as they did in 2000 when they started saying two-thousand and one, when they should really have said twenty-o-one. And why did this happen? Probably because no-one ever said twenty hundred. There is no such number as twenty hundred, so we all said two-thousand, which is good. The mistake was a year later when we missed the opportunity to spend the future saying twenty-o-one, twenty-o-two etc.

By next month, we will know.