1909

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:58 PM -0500 1/15/10, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 12:39 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>>
>>  in my Choosing a Variant course this quarter, we've spent some time on
>>  the currently hot topic, year names (and number names).  one of the
>>  students has asked me how people in 1906 referred to that year.  it's
>>  likely that there were several possibilities, of course.
>>
>>  anyone have any information on the question?
>
>At the beginning of the last decade I poked around a bit for evidence,
>from class cheers and the like. From what I could tell anecdotally,
>the most common formulation was "nineteen six." This is sometimes
>claimed as a Briticism, but there are plenty of examples in the U.S.
>as well.

And of course, unlike "Twenty nine" for 2009, there would be no
possibility of reinterpreting "Nineteen six" as any number other than
1906.  Now that we're moving into dates that similarly block such
reinterpretation, starting with "Twenty ten", it seems plausible to
expect that form of the date to predominate over "Two thousand..."

LH

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