Monday, January 3, 2011

I don't like the sound of 2011


I don't like odd numbers, and I like even less the way people have been saying dates since the year 2000 (and did anyone ever say "the year 1968" or "the year 1921"?)

You know how it goes. Two thousand and one. Two thousand and two. Two thousand and forever. Two/too many thousands of syllables (always with a completely superfluous "and" in the middle, as if we didn't know what followed). This reminds me of some dimwitted cartoon giant counting out golden eggs or something. "Now lemmee see. Two towsan' an' one! Two towsan' an' two!"


When the Olympics came along, it was suddenly a whole lot more sleek and modern to say "twenty-ten". I liked it. Three syllables. Now that we're into the next year, an odd number so I already hate it, people are lapsing back into "two thousand and eleven" - a spiky, pointy, ugly railroad spike of a number, with SEVEN syllables. (Another odd number. Gronk!)

Hey, did we used to say "one thousand, nine hundred and seventy two"? No, because people had better sense back then.

Here's another weird thing that nobody notices. We had the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, and then the - . The what? That decade never did have a name, and this one won't either. In fact, naming decades is over. I don't think it will ever happen again.













Howcome there are horses in this post? Cuz I have some nice pics left over. Booyah.