I have a small, humble, hesitant question for the world in which
I find myself in this nascent year 2010, which in case you haven’t
heard is to be pronounced
”
twenty-ten
”
and under no circumstances to be pronounced
”
two thousand ten
”
or, most blasphemous of all,
”
two thousand and ten.
”
I have a small, humble, hesitant question for the world in which I find myself in this nascent year 2010, which in case you haven’t heard is to be pronounced “twenty-ten” and under no circumstances to be pronounced “two thousand ten” or, most blasphemous of all, “two thousand and ten.”
I have learned this from several news organizations which in turn got their version of temporal holy writ from a more-linguistically-correct-than-thou group of people who actually think it is of sufficient importance to issue an edict to get our year-labels straight in the early portion of the century so there isn’t a problem later on when we have become entrenched in our erroneous appellation and discover to our societal horror that saying “two thousand” instead of “twenty” has handed the hard-won fruits of Western civilization over to the international terrorist conspiracy. I know I don’t want that on my head so “twenty” it is.
I mean, OK, I get the consistency factor; back yonder we started the name of whatever year we were in by saying “nineteen” – we didn’t say “one thousand nine hundred” unless we were trying to sound like a fustian cleric or needed to kill some extra time before we said the next thing. And if you’re counting, after nineteen you’d say twenty; got it.
But that was last century, last millennium, and who writes these rules anyway? Why can’t we embrace the winds of freedom blown in by such a momentous turn of the calendar? Why can’t we say “two thousand” if we want, just to validate how the world has symbolically changed; in fact, why can’t we say “two K ten” in commemoration of the famous “Y2K” experience which so exhilarated us all ten years ago, except for the part where we lived briefly with the seemingly reasonable possibility that all our computers were going to freak out and kill us or more diabolical yet, turn our cable TV signals into soulless, remorseless static.
Or if you want to go full-on outre, you can’t beat Roman numerals right now for maximum efficiency: this year is simply “MMX.”
The point is, how can mankind ever grow and flower in the fertile fields of the future if we remain slaves to accounting for our annual cycles around the sun in the same tired fashion people have been doing it for the past two thousand (no doubt to be strictly kosher I should say twenty hundred) years? And on that very exact, precise, nearly microscopic point, remember the classic Stanley Kubrick special-effects extravaganza “2001”? When you see the name of that movie what pronunciation does your brain assign to it? Since it was first released in 1968 and in the many thousands of times it has been referred to in popular culture, how many times have you ever heard anyone call it “Twenty-oh-one”? See, even back in the One Thousand Nine Hundreds people were open to alternative denotations; so since when do we meekly bow our heads and accept such inflexible regimentation?
It’s oppression I say, unjust oppression from the ivory towers of the Lords of Language, a sinister bunch if ever there was one, trying to evidence their superiority by making us all speak alike – damn it, we’re proud Americans, this can’t be tolerated, and furthermore …
Wait a minute, where was I – let me look back a few paragraphs and – yes, I see; I had a question, what was it? Oh, now I recall – my question: could we slow down a little on the mad technology rush particularly as it applies to cell phones?
I mean, I can no longer understand much of anything about my telephone; it’s pitiful. Apparently it can do a myriad wondrous things beyond the dreams of senior-level wizards, but I don’t know what they are or why I would want my telephone to do them. And every day nameless faceless people out there dream up more mysterious things for it to do.
I’m a little afraid that soon and without warning the only thing it will be unable to do is allow me to telephone someone and speak to them verbally with my actual voice like a regular person as we did in the days when merely being able to dial a number and speak to another person far away was quite magical enough.
But that was back when you could just say what year it was without risking trouble.
Despite being an award-winning columnist, Robert Mitchell doggedly remains the same eccentric attorney who has practiced general law in Morgan Hill for more than 30 years. Reach him at r.****@*****on.net
