Happy New Year 2010 !!!!

[Alex]

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.

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).

[JWBear]

So You are saying that a decade means anything you want it to mean? A decade is any grouping of 10 consecutive years? Then we can celebrate the end of a decade every year!

[Alex]

Hey! You just gave the exact definition of a decade. You should write dictionaries. Yes, a decade is any period of time ten years long. Just as a year (in our definition, other cultures have other definitions) is any period of time 365 (with some exceptions) days long.

Culturally, we decide which specific years we want to celebrate, out of all the infinite ones we could celebrate. For years we celebrate at 12:00am January 1 the previous 365 days. For decades we celebrate at the end of years ending in 9.

So, despite your eye rolling, I'm glad you finally have come around.

Let's go to the Random House Dictionary for those meanings of the word decade involving years:

1. a period of ten years: the three decades from 1776 to 1806.
2. a period of ten years beginning with a year whose last digit is zero: the decade of the 1980s.

Mirriam-Webster help out your argument at all? Nope:

1a: a period of ten years.

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:

1: a period of ten years.

From that bastion of all things truthy, Wikipedia:

"Although any period of ten years is a decade, a convenient and frequently referenced interval is based on the tens digit of the calendar year, as in using 1960s to represent the decade from 1960 to 1969."

Let's go to linguistic usage:

If on October 23, 2006 I had said "In the last decade the Oakland Athletics won 912 games." Would you assume I meant they won 912 games between January 1, 1991 and December 31, 2000 (which was the last decade using your definition)? No, you'd correctly interpret that to mean they won 912 games between October 24, 1996 and October 23, 2006. Because a "decade" is any consecutive ten year period.

Your turn. I assume this time you'll just have a rolly-eyes and a frowny face and maybe a fez hat left in your arsenal.

[flippyshark]

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.

Yes, exactly what I was saying also. So, the first year of our calendar (a theoretical supposition anyway) started on 1/1/00, and didn't get to be called year one until it was in fact a one year old.

Oh, I guess I said I wasn't arguing this anymore as of the year 2000. Count it up any way you like. I'm through with the aughts, and I've got a lovely numeral 1 in front of a zero on my calendar that seems to agree with that.

[JWBear]

Like I said... You can celebrate the end of a decade every single year. Thus celebrating 2009 as "the end of the decade" is meaningless by your definition. 2008 was the end of a decade; so was 2007, 2006, 2005, etc.

It doesn't change the fact that we are now in the last year of the first decade of the 21st century.

[Alex]

Nobody has claimed otherwise. The trick is finding someone who cares.

[JWBear]

Originally Posted by flippyshark

Yes, exactly what I was saying also. So, the first year of our calendar (a theoretical supposition anyway) started on 1/1/00, and didn't get to be called year one until it was in fact a one year old.

Oh, I guess I said I wasn't arguing this anymore as of the year 2000. Count it up any way you like. I'm through with the aughts, and I've got a lovely numeral 1 in front of a zero on my calendar that seems to agree with that.

There was no year 0. Inventing one to support your argument is meaningless.

When you are counting a group of objects do you start with 0 or do you start with 1? If you answer "1", then why would you count years any different?

[€uroMeinke]

Originally Posted by JWBear

When you are counting a group of objects do you start with 0 or do you start with 1? If you answer "1", then why would you count years any different?

Probably because a year is not a physical object

[JWBear]

Just because they're not physical doesn't mean we don't count them.

[€uroMeinke]

Originally Posted by JWBear

Just because they're not physical doesn't mean we don't count them.

Yes but they don't have physical boundaries making them complete countable units - the boundaries are arbitrary, you can start or end your count at any temporal point of reference. There is no breaking point in time where one time ends and another begins, we're dividing a single infinite continuum.