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Don Pearce[_3_] Don Pearce[_3_] is offline
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On Thu, 9 Jan 2020 14:27:11 -0500, "None" wrote:

"Don Pearce" wrote in message
...
The first year was year 1, making the first decade span the years
1 through 10, the second decade starting at year 11. Or is there
a trick to your question?


No trick. You make my point perfectly. Decades start on the year that
ends in a 1, not a 0.


The decade of the 2020's began in January, 2020. The 2020's are a decade.
That's the decade people mean when they refer to the decade that began
recently. There is also some ordinally-numbered decade that begins in 2021.
Nobody really cares about ordinally-numbered decades of the modern era.

The modern (aka Christian) era has a number line of years that is full of
anomalies and inconsistencies. It began in the years numbered in the several
hundreds, based on back-calculating from an origin that was arbitrary and
miscalculated. The rules regarding leap years have changed multiple times.
The timeline has been spliced and hacked multiple to accommodate errors and
anomalies. The date of the year's beginning has shifted. And in most usage,
it has no "year zero" (although many astronomers do use a year zero).

For these and other reasons, the reckoning of ordinally-numbered decades (or
centuries) seems to be of use only for pedantic posturing. These pedant's
decades have little use in the real world, where decades are much more
likely to be reckoned as beginning from years with numbers ending in zero.
The 2020's just began earlier this month. That's a decade. The "203rd decade
of the modern era" is a decade that nobody cares about.


I've just been listening to More or Less, a BBC programme about
numbers, statistics and general misconception. They had an article
about exactly this question. They had a statement from The Royal
Observatory in Greenwich, the official home of time on Earth. The
message stated unequivocally that millennia, centuries and decades
start on the year ending in a one.

End of discussion.

d