Here’s why 2020 is NOT the start of a new decade

Nobody wants to be that guy who’s always pouring cold water on somebody else’s idea. The guy who talks about rain when folks are trying to plan a picnic or complains that the words in that rap song don’t really rhyme.

I try to let stuff like that slide. Really, I do. I just ignore it.

But, I couldn’t help myself this time. We were having a planning meeting about stories for the start of the new decade. The kind of stories that wrap up the 2010s and set the table for the 2020s.

And I was that guy. I blurted it out. The new decade doesn’t start until 2021.

“Nobody looks at it that way,” I was told.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s right,” I responded.

So rather than just be the grumpy old (or at least middle-aged) man in the room, I was offered a chance to state my case.

This is why 2020 isn’t the first year of a new decade.

More than 2,000 years ago, recorded time jumped from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. without a Year 0 in between.

The best explanation I can find is that Western civilization was using Roman numerals when all that was decided, and that system didn’t address the concept of zero.

So if we started with Year 1, then decades end in years that end with zero.

If you’re trying to count the number of jellybeans in a dish do you start with zero or one?

The first goal in a hockey game? It’s one, not zero.

So each decade starts with a year that ends in 1. That’s true for centuries, too, but I gave up that fight back when folks were partying like it was 1999.

Remember Y2K? No? That’s because nothing happened. Probably because it wasn’t really the start of the century.

How about that classic science fiction movie “2000: A Space Odyssey?” Of course not. Because it was 2001.

Years ago, a colleague told me about his goal of having newspaper stories published in six consecutive decades. This was in 1999. I congratulated him on having only a few months to go.

He told me he had to hold out for more than a year.

It took me a minute to figure out what he meant, but once it clicked, I never forgot it.

So yeah, in the next few weeks you’ll see tons of stories wrapping up the past decade and looking ahead to the next. At least one will have my name on it.

But it’ll have a subtle acknowledgement that I know 2020 isn’t the start of a new decade.

I’m calling it the top weather events of the past 10 years.