Here we are in the ‘tens’ then. The ‘noughties’ felt a bit odd to say. Even ‘tens’ doesn’t feel as warm and fluffy as anything that can happily end in a ‘-ties’. I guess I was brought up on ‘fifties’ or ‘sixties’ or … well, you get the picture. Since the year 2000 (which logically should be pronounced “Twenty-hundred” in keeping with (say) 1900 being “Nineteen-hundred”) things have been a bit unsettled with all this year keeping malarkey.
The Twenty-hundreds started off very weirdly of course. For some inexplicable reason we all celebrated the new millennium a year early as we crossed over from 1999 to 2000. Obviously, yes we’d entered the ‘noughties’ although nobody wanted to call it that in public (it sounded, erm, naughty), but we hadn’t started the new decade or new century or new millennium.
When we count pink elephants passing us in the sky we don’t count the first one as ‘zero’. We count it as ‘one’. The start of the new millennium/century/decade was of course in 2001. Yet, we celebrated a year early as if we had crossed over into a brand new millennium, being the crazy mixed up humanity we are. Since then we’ve been confused and I suspect we’ve another ten years of confusion until we are safely in a ‘-ties’ again, the ‘twenties’.
To be annoyingly technical, of course we haven’t actually started a new decade yet, that’ll be next year, but people seem to want to wipe the slate and start these ‘tens’ with a renewed vigour. And why should I spoil their fun just because I always know better, eh?
England's England 