These new twenties might roar, but perhaps in ways not so apparently pleasant.
Kyrie eleison on this upcoming decade.

The Year 2000 ruined me a bit -- all the pedantic naysayers who pointed out the new Millennium didn't actually begin until 2001. …

However, the "popular view" has even more pull when it comes to counting decades. Tomorrow is the start of the 20's -- not the 1920's or the roaring 20's, but the first 20's that most of us were alive for.

[sigh]

To each his own, say I. Those whom Matthew stigmatizes as pedantic naysayers I applaud as arithmetically literate men and women. That is to say, they are the ones who notice that the Christian calendar, developed by a scholarly monk called Dionysius Exiguus* and proclaimed in 525, begins with the year 1, not the year 0 (zero). Call these folks simpleminded creatures if you will, but they conclude (as do I) that because a century has a hundred years and a millennium has ten times a hundred years, the third millennium of the Christian era ought to be reckoned as having started in 2001. Quod erat demonstrandum.

The underlying and overriding point is this: surely room ought to be made for polite disagreement on this oh so trivial matter between those who adopt popular labeling and those who prefer strict reckoning. Such accommodation is especially to be urged in the far looser matter of decade labeling. For example, are any of my arithmetically literate brothers-in-arms raising a stink about when any century's twenties or thirties or forties begin? (Answer: no.) Since any span of ten years, whatever the rightmost digit of the first year might be, may be called a decade for one purpose or another,** there is no conceivable point in insisting that a year ending in -30 be construed as part of the twenties, and so on up the scale. And that is why we pedantic naysayers don't insist and would be glad to see you arithmetical illiterates do likewise!

So then the big question is "What decade is the year 2100 a part of?" The answer is either "Who cares?" or "Let those with a crack at being alive in 2100 have their say in, oh, 2095 or so."

A happy, holy, and prosperous New Year to Matthew and all others hereabouts, and a relieved welcome, after twenty years of muddle, to an easily characterizable block of time!
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*It has for a very long time been reasonably assumed that a guy who came to be known as Dennis the Short must have been pretty darn short to stand out as such in a time and place where men who were 5'3" were not at all uncommon.

**Think of the sociological sense applied to the term "the Sixties," where what is meant is a period beginning roughly in 1963 or 1964 and ending just as roughly in 1974, 1975, or 1976. (I never suggested that sociologists could count.)