Goodbye to the "ots"

We now enter a new year and a new decade – and welcome to a new blog. If you should find this bit of content on the Web, I hope you will write to me and let me know. I would like to know somebody besides myself will read these posts.

There was some controversy about how to refer to the past decade – the period from 2000 until the end of 2009. I like the “ots.”

Now, a new – and strangely heated discussion – has sprung up about what to call the years in this decade. I don’t mean the collective – they will probably be called the “teens’ or something like that – I mean the years individually. For instance, how does one say “2010?” Is it “twenty-ten” or “two-thousand-ten?”

For the ots, I always thought “two-thousand-X” was best, as in “two-thousand-nine.” In the beginning years of the decade, I heard people refer to, say, 2002 at “twenty-oh-two.” I know we said “nineteen-oh-two” and “nineteen-ten,” etc., but “twenty-oh-two” just did not sound right to me. I was happy when people just seemed to settle on “two-thousand-two,” two thousand three,” etc. After all, didn’t we call the great Stanley Kubrick / Arthur C. Clarke film 2001: A Space Odyssey “Two-Thousand-One: A Space Odyssey?” It just made sense to me.

For this decade, though, I think “twenty-ten,” “twenty-eleven,” and so on is just obvious. I wouldn’t penalize people who want to say “two-thousand-ten” and so on, on, but I would not make that the default.

In the last century, we said “nineteen-ten,” “nineteen-sixty-nine,” “nineteen-ninety-nine,” and so forth. “Twenty-ten,” “Twenty-sixty-nine,” “twenty-ninety-nine,” right just right to my ears. You don’t find yourself using some these in your regular, daily conversation? Consider the following statements as converstion starters: "Medical science is advancing so rapidly tha I hope to still be alive and healthy in twenty-sixty-nine." Or, this one: “I wonder if the US will be out of Iraq and Afghanistan by twenty-ninety-nine!”