Out of all the hills you could animated sex position videochoose to die on in these, the final days of 2019, please do not be one of the people currently yelling on the internet about how it's not the end of the decade, actually.
In the words of the Dude, you're not wrong. You're just an asshole.
Well, asshole might be a bit strong. But this insistence is smug and unnecessary; its energy is half Scrooge, half reply guy. As a child, you probably thought "YOUR EPIDERMIS IS SHOWING" was the funniest joke in the world. As an adult, you probably correct other adults when they rejoice in the first day of a new season on the first of September instead of the 21st. (Either is fine.)
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The argument is that because there is no year 0 in the Anno Domini system our calendars are based on, the first year ever was year 1. Therefore, the first year of any and all subsequent decades is the one ending in 1.
For everyone else, the number dictates the decade: 1990 is in the '90s. It just makes sense.
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While that's the origin, whether we correct this obvious administrative snafu is up for furious debate. The New York Timesinterviewed a goddamn astrophysicist and not even they had a firm answer. (A Merriam-Webster editor did offer a definitive answer: as defined by popular culture and common usage, decades end after the 9 year. But to the decade pedant, that common usage is just more evidence that people are Stupid and they, the pedant, are Smart.)
We also had to deal with this in the early days of Twitter, 10 whole years ago. Back in the days of 140 characters and manual RTs, people were having this conversation, and also rolling their eyes about how this was already sorted out back in the Y2K days (when it was "Actually,the new decade/century/millennium isn't until 2001").
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If we abide by this system, those born in 1990 are officially '80s kids. Everyone born in a zero year, in fact, becomes a child of the preceding decade. Do you feel like a '70s kid, 1980 babies? Or does that thought make you feel 70?
Actually, 70 is a nice round number, isn't it? Much like 30, or 50. It just feels right to mark those big, round numbers when it's your birthday — to note that your age now starts with a new digit, which won't change for 10 years— even though by the time of your birthday you've already been in your 30th or 50th year of life for a full 364 days. (Although if you're 30 and would like to continue to identify as In Your Twenties, you do you.)
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If your inner pedant is twisted up over this, one Twitter user has an elegant solution: that zero-less first decade just went for nine years. The very first Noughties is an ancient outlier, the janky first pancake you nibble at while you make a neat stack of perfectly round ones.
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Just don't think too hard about it.
And sure, maybe it's technically correctto say that the decade ends in the 0 year, not the 9 year. It's also technically correctto say that tomatoes are actually a fruit. But your party-pooper technicalities are about as welcome as a punnet of cherry tomatoes in a banana-berry smoothie.
The simple fact is, when two digits in our numbered year change, instead of one, it feels twice as momentous. It feels new. It feels like something bigger than 2019 is ending.
And yes, in some ways it's as arbitrary as having an extra huge party when you're going from, say, 1996 to 1997, but in other, more important ways, it's not remotely like that at all.
We count out our lives in these numbered chunks, assigning years and decades a sort of synaesthetic quality or vibe in our individual and collective memories, collaged with denim trends and who was in charge of countries and what songs we couldn't escape and how the stories we told changed (or didn't). Decades are the biggest slices of time we can get a decent handful of in our silly human lifespans, and we like how referring to "the '50s" or "the '00s" makes the unruly passing of time feel neat and colour-coded. (Good riddance to "the '10s," which have always been awkward.) Throwing a whole different digit in there adds chaos and subtracts poetry.
SEE ALSO: The words and phrases that defined the decadeThere are situations where being technically correct matters. There are situations where facts matter, and the thing that pretty much everyone thinks even though it's wrong must be stamped out. This is, I promise you, not one of those situations.
Save your breath, pedants, for arguing about how all the Gatsby-inspired 1920s parties we're about to be bombarded with completely miss the point of the book. Sip your drink and enjoy the party. Some of us have an entirely illusory fresh start to squander over here.