Year names

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On May 2, 2007, at 7:14 AM, Jim Parish wrote:

> Recently, I've been participating in a LiveJournal discussion on the
> pronunciation of year names. The original poster, who is Swedish, was
> struck by President Bush's use of the phrase "two thousand seven" to
> refer to the current year...
>
> ... A British reader then commented that, to his(?) ear, "two thousand
> seven" sounded odd; he preferred "two thousand and seven"...

to pull out one small point, about "and" in number names (in general,
not just in year names).  i recall being taught at some point in
school that things like "one hundred and two", "two hundred and
thirty", etc. were vulgar errors (in both speech and writing), that
"and" should never be used in such expressions.  (this might have
been an instance of Omit Needless Words).  the lesson seems not to
have stuck with me, since i sometimes use one version, sometimes the
other.

but now i've spent 15 minutes looking through advice books of all
sorts, without finding anyone who has an opinion on the matter.  ah!
now i see that CMOS15 mentions "and" omission in passing, in
connection with an entirely different issue (not beginning sentences
with a numeral).  p. 381 has the example sentence:

   One hundred and ten candidates were accepted. (_And_ may be omitted.)

let free variation reign!

i *think* it's the case that "and" users get to have only one per
expression:

   one thousand eight hundred sixty-four complaints
   one thousand and eight hundred sixty-four complaints
   one thousand eight hundred and sixty-four complaints
  ?one thousand and eight hundred and sixty-four complaints

but maybe there are some examples of the fourth type out there.  ok,
there are.  a search on
   "thousand and * hundred and"
gets a big pile of hits.  most of them are pre-20th century, but
there are some modern ones, e.g.:

The price of the car would be around twenty one thousand and two
hundred and fifty dollars.
www.lordalex.org/knowledge/dallas%20used%20cars.html

Loans amounted to £11.637.905,00 (eleven million, six hundred and
thirty seven thousand and nine hundred and five Cyprus pounds) in
comparison with ...
www.coop-polis.com/profile.htm
[ooh, this one has *three* "and"s]

arnold

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