InnerTeub

(subtitle to this post: “God, I will do anything to procrastinate, won’t I?”)

I remember this argument when the year 2001 came around: people arguing that it was the real start of the decade, not the 1999-2000 flip over moment etc. etc. (This argument was awesomely portrayed in the West Wing: when one character commented that the demarcation point between the old millennium and the new millennium was a “largely unresolvable issue,”  Toby replies: “Tough to resolve, yes;  you have to look at a calendar.” ANYWAY )

I love me some good semantic arguments, and I also love winning them. So, to that end, I feel compelled to share with you Linda’s slam dunk statement of fact regarding this:

The period from 2000-2009 is a decade. A decade is a period of ten years. If I said, “the 201st decade of the Gregorian Calendar,” then we could get into a charmingly nerdy argument about how there was no Year Zero, so the first decade went from 1 to 10, and the second decade went from 11 to 20, and so on and so forth, so the 201st decade would go from 2001 to 2010. A decade, however, is any period of ten years — ask the dictionary — and the decade to which we refer at this point is the ten-year period from 2000 to 2009. I know you will e-mail me anyway. You know who you are. But consider this your warning that it will change nothing.

This entire post should be footnoted with the fact that you really need to add the above link from Linda into your Google Reader. With the exception of the snippet I excerpted, the article linked to is not it’s best moment, but trust me, the NPR’s  “Monkey See” blog is an awesome daily read for all things TV/Movie/Book related.