I also have a tendency to say "Last century", thinking it comedically suggests "a long time ago" without it actually being that long ago. But as time goes by it obviously becomes legitimately a long time ago, and I suspect young people wouldn't see the attempted irony at all.

'last century' 'turn of the century' etc just make me think the 1800s. So I just say last millennium.

Probably get confusing again when people start referring to 'the 20s' not as the 1920s.

You can actually do that today. In fact I did that for some time, because I didn't want to configure e-mail client. The only hard thing is HTML. Average HTML e-mail is almost impossible to read and friction to extract it to a file to open in a browser is too much.

perhaps you meant "in previous millennium" ?

If someone referred to the "previous decade" in 2004, would you have said the same thing?

As the calendar rolled from 1999 to 2000, we entered a new millennium, century, decade, year, day, ...

Yes, absolutely. I use the largest interval any time I can get away with it!

Every Jan 2 I start saying "last year" and every Dec I say "see you next year"

Just following alignment rules right?

>As the calendar rolled from 1999 to 2000, we entered a new millennium, century, decade, year, day, ...

no, that all happened when we rolled from 2000 to 2001.

smh, even paedants today aren't what they used to be.

The entirety of 1999 and 2000 was a nightmare. "No, buddy, we won't change millenium next january." "Nope. We are still in the 20th century." And so on...

I think that's more or less when I lost faith in humanity.

But they were right and you were wrong. Your mistake is in thinking that years are cardinal numbers when they're actually ordinal.

The current year counting was based on the same way years were counted in the past, so you had things like "the 10th year of Caesar's reign". So the year 1 A D. was the first year of Christ's reign.

The year 2000 was the 2000th year of Christ's reign so that's what is celebrated.

Alternatively, you don't really care about that and it's called Common Era now anyway, but in that case it's entirely arbitrary. So either way, calling 2001 the New Millennium is wrong!

The first 10 years are 1 through 10. That is the first decade. Consequently, the next decade is years 11 through 20.

The first century is years 1 through 100. Therefore, the second century is years 201 through 300.

The first millenium is years 1 through 1000. Therefore, the second millenium is years 2001 through 3000.

There is no year zero.

The first year of Christ's reign is the year 1.

The hundredth year of Christ's reign is the year 100.

The thousandth year of Christ's reign is 1000.

The two thousandth year of Christ's reign is 2000.

There is no year zero.

You lost faith in humanity because people disagree about an arbitrary zero offset?

when you compare tech from 1999 and today, it does feel like new millennium tbh

Presumably the years including 1999 and earlier

Excuse me while I crumble to dust...

perhaps you meant "in the Holocene"?

the Holocene is over, we are in the Anthropocene era

I know, that's why it'd be an alternative to "in the last millenium" if they try to use the largest time frame that just ended.