How Do You Say It?
January 4th, 2010
I can only magine the debates raging in newsrooms across America.
Reporters, anchor, producers, and administrators alike, all asking, how do you say it.
I’m talking about the year.
It’s 2010. Seems pretty basic.
But how do you say it. Is it two thousand ten or twenty ten?
What’s your thoughts?
Definitely “twenty-ten,” if for no other reason than consistency. “1910″ is “nineteen-ten,” “1810″ is “eighteen-ten,” and so on. Also, it’s much quicker to say.
I would have to say “two thousand ten” simply because when you orate numbers, you normally say two thousand and not twenty-something, at least i dont. I do however like the sound of twenty ten much better.
There was just a Grammar Girl podcast about this issue: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/how-do-you-pronounce-2010.aspx
They way I see it, the years 2000-2009 had to break from the standard chunking rule fourteen-ninety-two, ten-fifty-four, nineteen-oh-two, etc. Twenty-oh-one sounds too close to the number Twenty-one. Now that we’re past this ambiguous period we can go back to the form we’ve been using for the last millennium or so.