Happy new decade to you and yours! That is assuming that you believe that 2010 starts the new decade.
Some arithmetic geeks continue to argue that the decade doesn't start until 2011. Their argument goes like this: Decades have 10 years; The first year in the A.D. calendar is year 1; Therefore all decades start with a one and end with zero. I know it sounds absurd -- and it is -- but that's their entire argument. Like all geek arguments it starts from first principles, ignores historical, popular and rhetorical precedent, and hopes to win only by force of smug certainty and endless restatement. Fortunately there are many nuanced counterarguments, which I won't go into. I keep them in reserve for when I meet a calendar geek at a party and want to make their head explode, but that only happen every ten years or so.
The more common definition of a "decade" is a sequential group of years that share a common tens digit. So the "70's" include the 1970's, the 1870's, the 570's, etc., and when I say "the 1970's" I mean the years 1970 to 1979. The numeric foundation is modulo arithmetic: divide a year by ten, round down, and multiply by ten. This gives you the "decade number", which is really just the name of the decade. By this definition, years between 0001 and 0009 would be part of the "00's" -- the decade with zero in the ten's digit -- same as the one that just ended yesterday at midnight. It so happens that the first 00's had 9 years instead of ten.
There is another legitimate way to feel that the last decade still lingers. Decades are never so much numerological as they are cultural, and the cultural decade always lags the actual date. The cultural decade encompasses a gestalt: an overall tenor of the timespan. This is something that is hard to know in advance. The 60's mean social change and youthful rebellion; the 70's mean political scandal and personal excess; the 80's mean Reagan and cutthroat business practices. These all started in earnest a few years after the start of the technical decade, and spilled a little into the next decade before they were supplanted by the next.
There are often specific events that one can point to after the fact that mark the start of each new cycle. The 1960's, in my opinion, started November 22, 1963, the day JFK was assassinated. The 1970's began in 1972, sometime between June 17 with the Watergate arrest and December 19, with the end of the Apollo program. The last (or current) decade, which I like to call the "double-oh's", began without question on September 11, 2001. We have not yet seen the end event of this cultural decade. I'm shooting for 2011, with a definitive end to the Iraq adventure, although sadly it may be later.
Here's hoping that the cultural decade that follows is much, much better than the last one. In fact, let's make it so.
- jack*
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