Year names

[Benjamin Barrett]

Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Year names
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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.
>
I learned that, too, and try to remember to apply it. The rule we
learned was that "and" is to be used to indicate the decimal point or
fractions. I think most everyone follows this when they write checks:
six hundred five dollars and 05/00. BB

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