Was 2000 part of the 1990's?

[JVS]

Poll question: Was 2000 part of the 1990's?

[Iggo]

1. Technically, Yes. Culturally, No.

[JVS]

4. How is it technically part of the 90s?

A decade has ten years, the 90s have 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999 by my reckoning.

[Iggo]

9. The reasoning goes that , had they actually started at the beginning....

...there would have been no year zero. So the counting would have started at one.

[JVS]

10. I would buy into that if we called the 1960s the 197th decade AD, but we don't.

And just as the nineteen hundreds started in 1900 and ended in 1999, so the 1990s are the ten years from 1990-1999.

[Iggo]

11. I'm just sayin'. That's the reason.

I'm with you, though. The 90's are the 90's.

[Unvanguard]

2. Yes, it was. If you don't like the technical argument, try the political one:

Bush was inaugurated in Jan. 2001, and his presidency, for better or for worse, defined the decade that we will leave when 2011 comes.

[JVS]

5. What is the technical argument?

[jmm]

6. The technical arguement is zero isn't a year

Decades go from 1-10 not 0-9.

edited for clarity

[JVS]

7. (facepalm)

No they don't. Zero might not be a year but 1990 certainly is.

[jmm]

12. If you're asked to count to ten you don't say 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9.

Zero isn't the first, one isn't the second, etc. So when you count a decade why would you go from 1990-1999? If we're really getting technical a decade is any group of ten years so 1998-2008 was the first decade after I graduated from high school but when we're referring to general periods of time such as the 90's it goes from 1991-2000 because we're going from 1-10 not 0-9.

[Unvanguard]

13. The ordinality of year numbers.

In other words: it's not really the years 2000, 2001, 2002, etc., it's actually the 2000th year, the 2001st year, the 2002nd year, and so forth. The full phrase of the present year, for instance, is "the two thousand ninth year of our Lord" or "the two thousand ninth year of the Common Era."

So decades go from 1-10, not 0-9. Think about it: the first decade was the first year, the second year, etc., until the tenth year. So the same holds for every other decade: the year with the 0 in the ones place is the tenth and last year of its decade.

The problem is that people forget what the year numbers really mean, so they think of them as cardinal instead of ordinal, like the natural numbers, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.--and certainly if you want to group those in tens, it makes the most sense to just go by the number in the tens place.

[JVS]

14. Decades do go from 0-9 because we name decades after the higher columns.

Hence "the nineteen-sixties". It's a collection of all years with the form 196X. Centuries are ordinal, years and decades are not, unless you want to start talking about the first, second, third, etc, decades.

[Unvanguard]

17. The name something gets is beside the point.

You cannot group years into tens the way you suggest: you end up with a group of nine years at the beginning, and when the number of years is divisible by ten--exactly when the tens categorization should work best--you instead have nine at the beginning and one at the end unattached to a complete decade. That makes no sense.

It doesn't actually matter, in this case, whether decades are ordinal or not (at least in the way we usually refer to them they don't seem to be), but like dates and months, years are most definitely ordinal: we just don't talk about them that way. Think about it: age is our chief cardinal way of talking about time, and it indeed works exactly as you describe, with each decade of a person's life defined by the digit in the tens place. But children do not become one year old until they have already been around for a year. Year 1, on the other hand, is the first year of the CE/AD year scheme.

[JVS]

18. Oh yeah?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_decades

[Unvanguard]

20. I'm not sure Wikipedia is a definitive source when it comes to this. n/t

[Drunken Irishman]

22. It's not just Wiki.

It's every generation for years who have used this method.

That's why nearly universally everyone had a huge celebration on Dec. 31st, 1999 to celebrate the new millennium and not Dec. 31st, 2000.

[Unvanguard]

25. The fact of the convention has not eluded me. I just think it's a bad way to think of decades.

And unlike (almost) everyone else I did actually stubbornly insist on not recognizing the new millennium until Jan. 1, 2001.

[Drunken Irishman]

27. I don't mind it.

Because it does make it easier to classify something.

1990 ends in 90, which goes against the 1980s, which ends in 80.

I mean, 2000-2009 looks more official and easier to accept than 2001-2010.

You know what I mean?

[Unvanguard]

29. Well, that too depends on how you think about it.

If you're used to thinking of it as the tens digit, of course you're right, the conventional classification makes more sense. But I tend to think of it (at least after years of stubborn practice) in the way I suggest to JVS below: "the 1990s" are the years attained by adding the counting numbers 1-10 to 1990, so 1990, as 1980 + 10, properly belongs in the 1980s, and 2000, as 1990 + 10, properly belongs in the 1990s.

This is a bit of an artificial construction, obviously, but we group things in tens this way (1-10) often enough that it works, at least for me, as a reconciliation of the conventional term with what I think the "right" classification should be.

[JVS]

19. The name is the entire point of decade grouping.

1970 isn't part of the 1960s If that means that there is one short decade from 1-9 AD, it doesn't matter. Especially because nobody used the birth of Christ (which is only approximately known) as a time telling device within that decade.

[Unvanguard]

28. The point of decade grouping is to talk about trends and experiences over several years.

Whether it's 0-9 or 1-10 is irrelevant to that. The dispute here has nothing to do with the point of decade grouping, but has more to do with whether we should go with what is more conventionally recognized or what is more conceptually appealing (in a certain sense, anyway).

If the name really bothers you, think of "the 1960s" (for instance) as "the years attained by adding the counting numbers 1-10 to 1960."

[Drunken Irishman]

21. Your political argument makes little sense.

Clinton took office in January of 1993 and yet, his presidency defined the 90s.

Are you suggesting the 90s began in 1993?

[Unvanguard]

23. Haha, fair enough. It was not a particularly good argument.

Because, as you note, it does not generalize. It was not meant to be taken seriously.

[Drunken Irishman]

24. Okay.

Hopefully we look at the 2010s as the decade dominated by Obama, eh? :)

[mitchum]

3. This whole past decade was part of the 90s...

the 90s with no money and lots of war

[bamacrat]

8. The first year wasnt 0 I guess it was 1 but before it could be one it had to go through 0-12 months.

[Drunken Irishman]

26. That made my head hurt.

[Iggo]

31. Nope. 1 thru 12.

And if there actually had been a Year 1, it would have been The Year 1 all the way through, not just at the end.

[bamacrat]

32. I was thinking more about how we age which I know is defferent but you arent one till the end.

[Lucian]

15. Yes, it was.

The new millennium didn't start until 2001. I don't know why people were being stupid and celebrated it in 2000.

[JVS]

16. Since when are decades and centuries coterminal?

[rollin74]

30. yes, technically speaking

just as (technically) the current decade will end December 31, 2010

[kentauros]

33. YES!

Whether society likes it or not! :P

[ZombieHorde]

34. No. Even if "day one" was in 1643, the 1990's would still be 1990 - 1999.

Dates and math are two different things.