Antedating of "Yalie"

[Baker, John]

        It didn't take long, in the recent past:

        "What will the New Year and the decade of the Nifty Nineties bring?"  Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 1/1/90.

        "There will be a very nervous period in our relations with China through the mid-eighties until we see how they pull this off."  Dow Jones News Service, 1/21/80.

        "Appliances & equipment represented the biggest growth although construction applications are anticipated as the largest market for the seventies."  Edge, 7/1/72.

        There probably would have been earlier cites for the seventies and eighties, but my database had only limited coverage for those periods.

        I think you are right about the currently predominant idea being the new century rather than the new decade.

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: sagehen [mailto:sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM]
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 12:10 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Antedating of "Yalie"

I wonder, though, how far into each decade we were when we began to refer
to present circumstances as "the eighties," &c.  I think for now the
novelty of the  twenty-first century is what strikes us first when we
locate ourselves in time. A designation for the first decade may really not
be needed for a while.
We tend to speak of the early years of the twentieth century, not by decade
but by  reference to WWI.
A. Murie