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).

[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]

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

[flippyshark]

Originally Posted by JWBear

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?

I don't count any different than you do, but if I'm counting how many years have passed, then it seems logical to wait until 365 days have actually gone by before I count the first "object' (a year).

I'm not being entirely arbitrary. In the Julian scheme of things, there was no historical year zero - 1 BC was followed immediately by 1 AD (but then the current calendar wasn't instituted until freakin' 325). Astronomers decided they needed a year zero to keep the BC to AD line consistent with the mathematical number line when measuring the universe, so BC1 is scientifically year zero. Yay! I have scientifically valid reason to insist on a year zero! (It is concurrent with historical 1BC, admittedly) Anyway, the calendar got adjusted and modified by Gregory in the 15th century, rendering any accurate start date to the current common era kind of wonky.
(And then there are those 11 missing days somewhere in the 1700s, but who has time?)

Calendars are a social convention no matter how you slice it. Psychologically, the "x0 through x9" where x equals the current integer seems like a sound, psychologically pleasing and reasonably logical way to group these objects we call decades. I have no objection to you or anyone reckoning it otherwise, but, really, it's not arbitrary and I'm not stupid.

[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.

[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]

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