Ok, officially I don’t care. At least I didn’t.
I’d never have cared if you chose to say “Two thousand ten” or “Twenty-ten.” As far as reasonable and intelligible ways of pronouncing the year 2010 I think two thousand ten and twenty-ten are both acceptable.
And I would have continued to feel that way had someone not had the gumption to tell me that “you have to pronounce it twenty-ten.”
First of all, I don’t like anyone telling me what I have to do. I have a hard enough time stomaching when someone tells me I’ve spelled a word wrong, or made a grammatical error – even when they are right. Those things are at least provable one way or the other. But telling me that I have to pronounce a number this way instead of that is just down-right asinine; especially when your reasoning is that “it doesn’t sound good.”
So who really cares how you say it anyway?
Well, apparently the NAGG cares; the National Association of Good Grammar. If that sounds like a made up association that’s because it is. It’s just some douche and his friends who like to point out when they think people have made a grammatical error. And they have arbitrarily decided that “two thousand ten” sounds bad.
The NAGG’s founder, Tom Torriglia, has argued that the reason you don’t say “two thousand ten” is because you didn’t say “one thousand nine hundred ninety nine” before two thousand.
Well, so the f* what? I did say “two thousand nine” all last year. And “two thousand eight” the year before that. And I have heard people say, “nineteen hundred ninety nine.” Though it did sound somewhat arcane, it was intelligible. And I’d never have dared to tell them that they were pronouncing the year wrong.
And since when does how you pronounce words have anything to do with grammar. Since never. Which, incidentally, is pronounced “neh-vrr.” Or you could go with “not-hundred and ever.”
I was going to make the argument that in a country with free speech no one should ever tell me what I can and cannot say. But then I realized that I would be telling someone what they could not say. Which would be ironic.
So, Mr. Torriglia, and your NAGG ilk, bitch all you want about me pronouncing 2010 as “two thousand ten”
It sounds good to me.
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1 comment:
NAGG also says that everyone has been wrong for the past decade. That we should have said twenty o'nine, twenty o-eight, based on past history. I highly doubt people at turn of the last millenium said ten o-one, but instead said thousand and one. While he may have an argument about the years following 2009, his argument about the last 10 years seems flawed.
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