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May the fleas from a thousand camels infest the ones who dare say it the wrong way --or especially make a mistake and write the wrong year on their check for the first few days !!
Your statement is not true, but it's also not false (in a very very technical sense which is outdated). A decade is any ten year period, not specifically 2001-2010, or 1981-1990. When you refer to the 80's, does that include 1990? I'm guessing not. I could refer to March 8 1433 through March 7 1443 as a decade.
Your statement is not true, but it's also not false (in a very very technical sense which is outdated). A decade is any ten year period, not specifically 2001-2010, or 1981-1990. When you refer to the 80's, does that include 1990? I'm guessing not. I could refer to March 8 1433 through March 7 1443 as a decade.
It's true that the word "decade" can mean any period of ten years, just as "year" can mean any span of 365 (or 366) days. Nonetheless, the anno domini enumeration of the Gregorian calendar begins with 1 January 1 (theoretically, since the Gregorian calendar did not come into existence until the 16th century, but it retains the enumeration of years of the Julian calendar that preceded it). Thus, the first enumerated decade encompasses the years 1 through 10, the second decade encompasses the years 11 through 20, etc., so the 201st decade encompasses the years 2001 through 2010. This means that many of the news organizations, in presenting their "... of the decade" analysis, are in fact a year early.
I'm not sure why cultural periods (the 30's, the 40's, the 50's, etc.) seem to last about ten years, give or take, but the duration is seldom exactly a decade and the alignment is invariably inexact. When we speak of "the '30's" (or "the 1930's), we are typically talking about the cultural period of the Great Depression -- which began with the stock market's "crash" in 1929 and ended with our entry into World War II in December of 1941. The cultural period of "the 40's" really encompassed the prosperity of World War II, the post-war period, and the Korean War, while "big band" music prevailed, and thus lasted until perhaps 1952 or 1953 or so. The cultural period of "the 50's" is characterized by true "rock and roll" to which couples danced the "jitterbug," saddle shoes, poodle skirts, and the most intense years of the Cold War, and thus generally really encompassed about the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. The cultural period of "the 60's" saw a transition to hard rock, couples dancing apart, the "Great Society," extreme (and not exactly unjustified) political discontent with seriously misguided policies in Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, muscle cars and pony cars fueled by cheap gasoline, and race riots in many of our cities that really lasted until about 1973. The cultural period known as "the 70's" saw an oil crisis and associated gas lines, followed by very high fuel prices that fueled astronomical inflation and economic stagnation, a presidential crisis, disco "music" and disco "dancing," and the leisure suit (yuck!), and really endured to 1982 or so. We tend to associate "the 1980's" with Reagan's military buildup that brought the end of the "Cold War," sustained economic growth, and a dramatic rise of terrorism in the middle east and "the 1990's" with the Clinton presidency and all of Bill's foibles, and the "high tech" bubble in the stock market, the rise of the Internet. It might be a bit early to characterize "the 2000's" yet, but it's pretty likely that the war on terrorism, the rise of "reality" programs on television, the legacy of the New Engalnd Patriots, and the chain of economic crises (the collapse of the tech bubble, the economic fallout of the "9/11" attack, the failures of Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco, bankruptcies by several major airlines, and the financial crisis that triggered the failures of Chrysler, GM, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and several banks) will figure prominently. But few of these eras lasted exactly ten years or and virtually none transitioned at the actual turn of the decade.
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CRUISES
Century 4/1998
Mercury 4/2000+4/2006+7/2007
Sensation 4/2002
Infinity 4/2003
Summit 4/2004+4/2005
Carnival Liberty New Year's Eve 2007
Liberty of the Seas 5/2008+11/2009
Solstice 4/2009
Oasis 4/2010
Allure 1/16/ 2011
Equinox 4/11/2011
All the influential language organizations have officially adopted twenty-ten. After a few months of hearing twenty-ten in the media, you'll come around.
How to say 2010
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