I've watched this debate over the past decade or so with mostly just mild amusement and disinterest: should we be pronouncing our years as starting with "twenty" or with "two thousand"? Since we clearly started with "year two thousand", and then followed that up with "two thousand and one" (a space odyssey), it seemed from the get-go that it should really be "two thousand". Sure, that's an extra syllable, or really two extra syllables once you start adding the "and" in, but c'mon: it just sounds so cool and futuristic!
However, this year that we're now in may change everything. There's quite an appeal, to me anyway, in saying "twenty twelve." Why? Because of the repetition of the "tw" sound! And if "twenty twelve" sounds great, just imagine what "twenty twenty" will do for us!
Anyway, I reserve the right to regress back to "two thousand and thirteen" next year, but for the just-born yearling we're in, I'm definitely going to try to refer to it as "twenty twelve!" Let's just see how that goes.
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I was with you until you said you were going to regress to "two thousand and thirteen" next year. Are you serious? Hopefully that's a joke. The teens are when the twenty pronunciation will work best!
we never said one thousand nine hundred and fifty eight ( a good year). We said nineteen fifty eight.
I think we only said two thousand for the first 10 years because it was weird or confusing to say "twenty zero" or "twenty six". But now that we are out of the first 10, no one is going to say two thousand ever again!
my guess anyway.
Good points, Sue, except: lots of people did say things like "Back in nineteen hundred and forty-two", although they tended to be older and/or much more formal folk. So I think you're probably right, and we'll soon be into "twenty _____" for good.
Let's take 1950 as an example year: in the English language the pronunciation "nineteen fifty" is a shortened version of "nineteen hundred and fifty". Now we're in 2013 and the question is: would you say "twenty hundred and thirteen" (which can well be shortened to "twenty thirteen") or two thousand and thirteen? I suppose it's only a matter of how you read numbers and deciding whether you spend "twenty hundred" dollars on something or "two thousand" dollars on something... at the end of the day it's the same thing. We could even end up reading 2013 as "two grand thirteen"... joking obviously, but there's a point.
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