We count centuries that way, because we say "1st century", "20th century", "21st century". (That is, "20th century AD".) Ordinal numbers, based on the year 1 AD.
Nobody says "178th decade", or "213th decade". Decades are cardinal numbers. Nobody starts "the decade" in the 1 year.
wow rude, I do. I think the 60s started 1961-01-01 and understand that people usually mean "the years that give a quotient of 196 when divided by 10".
I understand that we use ordinals to refer to centuries, also I understand how that's unrelated to which specific years are in a decade/century/millennium
fun fact the Australian constitution came into force on the 1st of January, 1901, aligning with the starting boundary of the 20th century.
wow rude again, that's not 'assuming the best intent of the commentator' and is against this site's code of conduct
> [I] understand that people usually mean "the years that give a quotient of 196 when divided by 10".
since I'm not a pedantic sicko that gets off on telling people they're wrong and lording my hugely advanced intellect over them, I use human words for genuine natural interactions.
That'll sort it itself out over the coming decades; but the other interesting one to me is that a sizeable group (majority?) of people are still saying "two thousand nineteen" instead of "twenty nineteen". I'm pretty sure I stopped using the former shortly after 2009 ended. I wonder if that'll stick for the whole century.
In the other language I speak fluently (Portuguese) there never was an abbreviation, it was always the full "one thousand nine hundred ninety" as opposed to "nineteen ninety". In that case "two thousand" is already an improvement, but for some reason it bothers me in English.
Interesting. I definitely prefer “twenty nineteen”, but can’t swear I would never call it “two thousand nineteen”. It might end up sticking around until 2100.
Do people refer to the first decade of this century as "the two thousands"?