On Celebrities Speaking Numbers


Okay, “Celebrities Speaking Numbers” is a silly title but

celebrities

is one of my SEO keywords and I need to get them in to point traffic to my website. This blog is generally about marketing my (so called) celebrity books but from time to time I find myself thinking about something that’s not book related and want to share here it with my readers. Hence the silly (rationalistic) title. My apology; but now that you’re here I hope you find this little essay amusing.

The way we write and speak numbers was on my mind and in my conversation with Elizabeth last night. Actually it wasn’t a conversation with her so much as it was a monologue directed at her. I got to declaiming on how we speak the years in this particular century.

When we back up a hundred and sixteen years there’s nothing to talk about. Nineteen hundred, nineteen-oh-one, nineteen-ten, nineteen-thirty-five (a good year); it’s always nineteen-something. Occasionally someone will say nineteen-hundred-three but never one-thousand nine-hundred-three.

Since two thousand-one number-speak has changed. I never heard anyone say “twenty-hundred” but that seems obvious. However there was one person I did hear say – even for the movie title – “twenty-oh-one”; my brother-in-law, Charlie. That always sounded wrong. Actually Charlie and I found a lot wrong with one another but that’s a different essay. The name of that year is two thousand-one. That’s the title of the book, the title of the movie and the correct way to speak the name of that particular year. Period.

2001

2001

And that’s not all. Two thousand-two through two thousand-nine sound right to my ear. Then we go to twenty-ten and so on upward through the end of the century. It’s extremely unlikely, nay impossible, that I – in my current incarnation – will be concerned about this semantic numerology by twenty-one hundred so I don’t give a damn. You kids who are (not) reading this will just have to figure it for your selves.

1 May 2016 (Twenty-Sixteen)

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