Quote:
Originally Posted by JWBear
I've never heard people call infants under 1 as "1 year old". It's always "He's 6 months old" or "She's 9 months" etc. I've never heard that designation as "1 year old" used until after the 1st birthday.
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You're absolutely correct. In fact, that's pretty much what I said. My point was that we could do it the other way and it wouldn't be any more right or wrong.
The social convention to answering "how old are you" is "how many anniversaries of your birth have you had" (currently, I've experience 35 anniversaries of my birth). It could be the ordinal "in which year of life are you?" (currently, I'm in the 36th year of my life).
Neither is more right or wrong. One is just what was settled on. The fact that years uses the other convention is somewhat lost by modern linguistic usage but it used to be clearer in such constructions as "in the year of our lord one-thousand seven-hundred and eighty-seven" (to use the U.S. Constitution as an example). We could easily use the same convention for people and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that, in a time before common use of calendars that was the norm (I know some cultures increased age not on the occasion of a birth anniversary but on the occasion of specific hoilday, as if everybody got one year older on the 4th of July).