OK, I jumped the gun a bit. Sorry.
I should know that new decades don’t start until the ’01 year. It drove me NUTS when everyone was touting the new millennium a year too early.
So I apologize for saying that this current decade is one week from closing. We actually have 53 more weeks until the new decade begins.
This New Year, however, is still a good time to reflect on the ups and downs of your life and career over the past few years. The good news is: If you didn’t complete your goals for this decade, you still have a year left!
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Your website looks really good. Being a blog writer myself, I really appreciate the time you took in writing this article. Thanks!
OK, you’ve both made your points. Let’s move on and have a HAPPY New Year. Thanks.
Actually, there _are_ people who say the ’80s didn’t start until 1981. See http://alpineopinion.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/is-2009-the-end-of-the-noughties-decade/ in the comments, for example.
And what I know perfectly well is that people are speaking of 2010 as the first year of the decade (the teens? the onesies?) after the naughties or oh-ohs, just as they spoke of 1980 as the first year of the eighties. This is sometimes confused with being exactly the same as the first decade of the third millennium, true, and that it is not, but it is rather you than I who are jumping on a bandwagon. If thinking things through is more your style, you must inescapably reach the same conclusion as I have; at the present, you appear mainly to be jumping on the gotcha-game you-people-are-all-idiots bandwagon.
In short, you’re being either self-deceptive or disingenuous. Since you seem to be OK with 1980-1989 as a decade qua decade, you tell me which is the key to your inconsistency.
I wouldn’t even need to talk about this if it weren’t for the gotcha-game types who insist on going about “pointing out” to people that they’re wrong, wrong, wrong, which _is_ obnoxious. And it _is_ semantic onanism. I’m trying to bend people back _into_ shape, as it happens.
Apples and oranges. And you’re playing “gotcha” yourself, with a semantic quibble. You know perfectly well that people are speaking of this new year as the first year of the SECOND decade of the century. They are not treating it as some arbitrarily chosen “period of any ten years.” And NOBODY is saying 1980 wasn’t “part of the eighties”, you’re setting up a straw man. Calling people onanists for differing on this business is just obnoxious. To borrow your phrase, “nobody will die” from either usage. It’s useful for people’s automatic, unthinking, jump-on-the-bandwagon style reflexes to be challenged sometimes. Those of us who do “sweat it” can live with being called “onanists”. (The funny thing is how bent out of shape people get on this; it’s just like the millennium business ten years ago, point out to people that there was no year zero, and they treat you as a freak. Whatever. Some of us got to have two millennial celebrations. So it’s all good. Happy New Year.
Thanks for the explaination!
A decade is any set of ten years; decades as commonly referred to can be any set of ten years we commonly agree to refer to as a decade. In our culture, we are in the habit of naming years as the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, etc. 1980-1989 was ten years and was thus a decade; it’s silly to say that 1980 wasn’t part of the eighties and 1990 was — it’s obviously false, and is nothing other than semantic onanism and more of the absurd gotcha games some people like to play with language.
Yes, yes, the first decade of the second millennium AD doesn’t end until the end of 2010. But if we’re not talking about _that_ decade, we can talk about the decade that had two 0’s in the middle of the years — the noughties or oh-ohs. Nobody will die from doing that. And that decade is ending now.
The difference between this question and the one of the new millennium is that we’re agreed on counting millennia starting at the year 1. If we want to talk about the 201st decade, well, it has a year left. But we don’t _have_ to talk about that decade. We could talk about the ’80s rather than the 199th decade, for instance.
So don’t sweat it. The oh-ohs are over. Clearly.