1909

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:01 PM -0500 1/15/10, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>
>>  At 12:58 PM -0500 1/15/10, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>>  >
>>  >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..."
>
>...which was the rationale for selecting "twenty-ten" for Most Likely
>to Succeed in the WOTY voting, with John Rickford (I think) suggesting
>that this was also a vote for the "twenty-X" form all the way to 2099.

During which discussion I had the (unspoken) prediction that we can
expect many books, op-ed pieces, blog entries, et al. a decade or so
from now whose names will be variations on "A 2020 Vision", "2020
Hindsight", "Seeing 2020",...

LH

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