'011

I've spent the last decade or so complaining about how people refer to our year numbers. For the first thirty-eight years of my life, ever since that lovely May day in 1962 when I sprang forth to ruin the world, things were going along all right. It was "nineteen" and the next two digits. Nineteen-seventy-nine. Nineteen-ninety-one. Stuff like that.

As 1999 ticked by I eagerly awaited the cross over to the next. If you were alive then, and you remember, there were many funny people thinking the world was going to end. Elevators would plummet to earth, traffic lights would blink out, and computer systems would crash. I thought it was funny because I thought it was all rather unlikely. Turns out I was right. Yay for me.

Then we hit 2000 and things began to go bad. I'm not talking the computer problems, I'm talking about how we said the new year. There was far too much of "the year 2000" rather than just "2000." I realize that it was an aberration, a very weird looking and weird sounding year, but there was no reason to wrap it up in the uncomfortable "year 2000." To this very day some people perpetuate this absurdity. I find it annoying.

Things calmed for a while. Two-thousand-one was all right, although if truth be told it should have followed the conventional nineteen-hundred-one from one hundred years earlier. Twenty-oh-one would have been better. Perhaps if we had done it that way we wouldn't be in the difficulty in which we are currently mired.

Two-thousand-two (twenty-oh-two). And so on until two-thousand-nine.

By the time we landed in 2010 last year it should have been clear to all thinking adults (and some particularly bright children like mine, and maybe yours) that we should say twenty-ten. It's easier than two-thousand-ten and we didn't say one-thousand-nine-hundred-ten, we said nineteen-ten. Clearly the first two digits of the year number should be addressed together. It is 20 and something, so I hope you pass along this message of hope and prosperity to everyone you know and tell them how to properly say the year.

Because some of the people you know are starting to annoy the hell out of me. Until we can get this corrected, I am going to return the favor. I will say twenty-eleven on occasion, but in the grand tradition of '08 and '09 I will call this year '011 (oh-eleven) and I am going to keep it up until the two-thousand thing is eradicated from our common language.

Who's with me?!