With my mind in a permanently addled and sleep deprived state recently, many strange thoughts have occurred to me. They mainly enter the old brain box during the course of the morning commute, often triggered by a random newspaper headline glimpsed over the shoulder of a stranger, before passing out again and into the ether.
One such thought however, has stuck with me for a couple of days - it's maddening. I hope by writing about it I will dispel the thought from my conscience as if it were some kind of ancient curse in need of exorcising - "I need an old priest and a young priest, and failing that get me a blog upon which I can post nonsense".
Why, when we refer to the current calendar year of our Lord, do we say 'two thousand and nine'? Not 'twenty nine' nor 'twenty hundred and nine' but specifically 'two thousand and nine'?
By next year we will undoubtedly be saying 'twenty ten' rather than 'two thousand and ten' and we're already preparing for the 'twenty twelve Olympics'! The equivalent decade of the last century is always 'nineteen 'o' nine' or 'nineteen hundred and nine' So why change now?!
I wonder what choice was made even further back at the turn of the last millennium? Did 'King Ethelred the Unready' refer to his reign over England as spanning the year 'One thousand', and if so, why precisely was he 'unready'?
Did he, when signing off his Christmas speech, wish everyone a "very, happy and peaceful one thousand and one" unaware that every other upstanding citizen was saying 'ten hundred and one' and therefore suffering a lifetime of humiliation at the hands of his loyal subjects for not conducting the proper research?
You can bet your bottom dollar that by the turn of the next millennium it will change again. Perhaps, we'll refer to the date as 'three, triple zero' or maybe we'll be done with the whole thing and just settle for giving the year in binary, and don't even get me started on whether we refer to the current decade as the 'noughties'.
I think I'm slowly losing my mind....
One such thought however, has stuck with me for a couple of days - it's maddening. I hope by writing about it I will dispel the thought from my conscience as if it were some kind of ancient curse in need of exorcising - "I need an old priest and a young priest, and failing that get me a blog upon which I can post nonsense".
Why, when we refer to the current calendar year of our Lord, do we say 'two thousand and nine'? Not 'twenty nine' nor 'twenty hundred and nine' but specifically 'two thousand and nine'?
By next year we will undoubtedly be saying 'twenty ten' rather than 'two thousand and ten' and we're already preparing for the 'twenty twelve Olympics'! The equivalent decade of the last century is always 'nineteen 'o' nine' or 'nineteen hundred and nine' So why change now?!
I wonder what choice was made even further back at the turn of the last millennium? Did 'King Ethelred the Unready' refer to his reign over England as spanning the year 'One thousand', and if so, why precisely was he 'unready'?
Did he, when signing off his Christmas speech, wish everyone a "very, happy and peaceful one thousand and one" unaware that every other upstanding citizen was saying 'ten hundred and one' and therefore suffering a lifetime of humiliation at the hands of his loyal subjects for not conducting the proper research?
You can bet your bottom dollar that by the turn of the next millennium it will change again. Perhaps, we'll refer to the date as 'three, triple zero' or maybe we'll be done with the whole thing and just settle for giving the year in binary, and don't even get me started on whether we refer to the current decade as the 'noughties'.
I think I'm slowly losing my mind....
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