Battle of pedants in twenty-eighteen

more naturally twenty-twenty five than two thousand and twenty-five. Of course, back in 1969, Zager and Evans sang that line from the song, In the year twenty-five, twenty-five. maybe indicating future terminology.

The real test case though may well come from looking at the first century of the previous millennium, that is, the years beginning with one then zero just as this century begins with two then zero.

As a student at Hobart High School in the 1960s it was de rigueur to know the date of the Battle of Hastings. Of course it was 1066. Pronounced by all as ten sixtysix, never one thousand and sixty-six. Will the year 2066 more likely then be twenty sixty-six rather than two thousand and sixty-six? So as this century progresses, it will be interesting to see whether our nomenclature will be influenced by Battle of Hastings’ terminology rather than by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. Again, is it important? Probably not!

History can be littered with examples of the unimportance of names. French philosopher Voltaire gave such an example when he declared the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t holy, wasn’t Roman and wasn’t even an empire!

In short, despite it being a good pedantic discussion, the naming of the years of course won’t change anything about them.

So leaving the last word on the irrelevancy of names to Shakespeare, Juliet says after discovering Romeo is a Montague, her family’s enemy.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Ian Cole is a former Hobart teacher who was a state Labor MP in the 1970s.