least likely to succeed? really?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 10:07 AM, Grant Barrett
<gbarrett at worldnewyork.org> wrote:
>
> On Jan 8, 2010, at 23:42, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>> she clearly intended her use of "the two
>> thousands" to refer to the decade just ended.  So another expression
>> successfully used (not just mentioned or proposed) for that
>> unnameable decade.
>
> I've been telling people that's already the name of the decade for years, as
> long as one ignores the "what shall we call it?" uses. Listening to
> unselfconscious talk in the media and in public shows it and a search of
> Google can show it (many of these are good hits for it:
> <http://tinyurl.com/yez8klk>).

The typical criticism of "the two thousands" is, as I wrote back in
aught-seven, its potential ambiguity: "it could just as easily refer
to the current century, or the current millennium."
<http://blog.oup.com/2007/12/aught/>

That ambiguity is on display in some of the Googlehits (albeit a
minority of them):

"The many international wars that have plagued the millennium of the
one thousands, will almost disappear in the two thousands."
"And no one had thought to inform the computers that one day the
universe would pass from the years of the one thousands into the years
of the two thousands."
"At the end of this millennium the GMDSS will be fully implemented and
the SAR arrangements will be completed early in the two thousands."


--Ben Zimmer

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