Consulting Journal: Style

This article is reprinted from The Consulting Journal
http://www.consultingjournal.com

Style: 2010

by David Blakey

Why is anyone debating how to pronounce 2010?

[Monday 11 January 2010]

I have been surprised at the different opinions put forward on how to say 2010.

Think back to 1999. That year was called nineteen ninety-nine. The precedent is to say the year as two two-digit numbers 'nineteen' and 'ninety-nine'. This has long been one of the two ways in which English speakers have stated what a year in the Christian era is. (The other is nineteen hundred and ninety-nine, which is not used in normal everyday speech.) So, we have had ten sixty-six, seventeen seventy-six, eighteen twelve, and nineteen eighty-four. Popular songs have referred to twenty-five twenty-five and a future fiction television series has included dates such as twenty-one fifty-three.

Now think back to 2000. It was logical to make a change to the precedent to call it two thousand rather than twenty zero. Then 2001 was called two thousand one or two thousand and one, to avoid calling it twenty one, which would sound like 21. And so on through 2009, which was better called two thousand nine than twenty nine. Now that we are past the first ten years, it seems sensible to revert to the previous precedent and call the year twenty ten.

The precedent may have been established to keep the names of years as short as possible, and twenty ten has three syllables while two thousand ten has four. I do not accept that the precedent was established by dropping the word hundred from the date, even though years may sometimes be referred as nineteen hundred and fifty three, as this would not explain why 1066 can be called either ten sixty-six or one thousand and sixty-six. 1066 is not called ten hundred and sixty-six, so ten sixty-six cannot be an abbreviated form of it.