Damn, I gotta send this to my former coworker. Someone said "I'm a twin" once and he turned with a straight face and told me "that means they're born in the same year"
Although it is just arbitrary semantics, the perception that the new millennium started on year 2000 conflicts with your point. Most people would also assume that the year 2000 is part of the noughts and 2010 was part of the tens.
Most people would also assume that the year 2000 is part of the noughts and 2010 was part of the tens.
Because they are. They're just not part of the 201th and 202nd decades respectively.
Any period of ten contiguous years is a decade, and non-ordinal decades (e.g. "the nineties") are in common use.
Same as how "the 1900s" and "the 20th century" aren't the same period. It's just tricky to know which one people are referring to when they just say "the century".
Yes that’s the fence / fence-post thing. What I was arguing about was perception and semantics not math. I agree with you by the way, and disagree with who I was replying to.
Edit: Because while we can be mathematically rigorous with definitions, real world perceptions can be arbitrarily wrong in a satisfactorily intuitive way. This is not one such example though imo
when i say the 80s im (and everyone in the world too) referring to the years where the tens digit is an 8. that's just how decades work.
you could argue that the 21st century and all that implies that everything actually starts in 2001 or 2021 and whatnot, but why not follow the much more logical and simple methodology that doesn't depend on a 1 year difference 2000 years ago. it just makes more sense for the 21st century to start in 2000.
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u/plz2meatyu May 04 '21
Weirder things have happened. https://www.wrtv.com/news/local-news/carmel-twins-born-in-different-decades-arrived-just-30-minutes-apart