two things I don't want to hear about today

[calimac]

1) That it's not the end of the decade. Of course it's the end of a decade. It's the end of the decade whose third digit is "0". That's just as legitimate a decade as any enforced by reference to the millennia-ago start of an arbitrary counting system which a) wasn't invented until centuries after its starting point, and b) doesn't even accurately mark the event it's supposed to commemorate.

It's pointless to protest that there was no Year Zero. There was no Year One A.D., either, not at the time. Since all those dates are arbitrarily and retroactively applied, there's no technical reason we couldn't retroactively renumber the B.C.s with a Year Zero in there, if we wanted to. Retroactivity goes on in science all the time. It'd be little more confusing than remembering that the same element has been Wolfram and Tungsten, or that the same fossil has been Zinjanthropus, Australopithecus robustus, and Paranthropus, at various times in its recent history. It's not as if the critter was called any of those things when it lived.

Only we'd need two Years Zero, wouldn't we, one B.C. and one A.D., or else our decades and millennia would have to begin in July instead of January.

2) That it's a "blue moon." The misinterpretation of the term as meaning "second full moon in a calendar month" is an error dating from no earlier than the 1940s, and I never came across it until the 80s or 90s. Second full moons occur every few years, so it's quite at odds with the casual expression, "once in a blue moon," which means "so rarely you should absolutely not count on it" or "not impossible, but effectively never" and certainly not "you can predict it in advance." Once in a great while - so rarely you should absolutely not count on it, and you certainly can't predict it in advance - atmospheric conditions will make the moon actually appear blue.

When that happens, let me know. That's a blue moon; this isn't. Cecil says we should give up and accept the new meaning, but, as with the decade-counting, I prefer to have my usages make sense.

ETA: I also don't want to hear, "Thank goodness the decade's over." Yes, it's been a terrible ten years. But the third digit "0" didn't do this to us. A lot of what's bad now is likely to go on getting worse.

Comments

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

The arbitrarianess of our time divisions and names, and our, apparently, bone-deep belief that they're inherent in the universe, fascinates me. Minutes, weeks, months, decades, etc - they're all very arbitrary and human defined. The seasons and our trip around the sun, those are something real and not invented for our convenience (but we *have* tried with our slightly off definition of year). None of them existed until we invented them nor do they inhere in the fabric of the universe. They're invented and artificial and yet we insist so hard on their reality. Fascinates me. Humans is weird.

MKK

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Even a "year" is arbitrary and human-defined in one sense. While it's a physical fact that a planet takes that long to make a complete solar circuit, the deeming of that fact as significant is human-defined. It's a convenient unit for our purposes, largely because it marks off seasons, which are significant to us because we have to live in them. If we were space-dwelling aliens who only observed planets, we might choose some fraction of the orbit instead.

(What's the proper unit to measure the size of a circle? Radius, diameter, or circumference? Answer: whichever is most convenient. You can easily calculate both of the other two from whichever one you've got.)

And, of course, as you note passingly, what we call a year for calendar purposes is not an actual year. If we want to celebrate the actual one-year anniversary of last year's New Year's celebration, we'd have to wait until (if I've calculated this correctly) 5:49 A.M. on Friday morning. I'm not staying up that late.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Yes, of course, and what's even more arbitrary about our year is its start/end. I wish we'd go back to starting the year in the spring. That makes way more sense to me than starting a year in the cold and dark.

MKK

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

True. I'm not sure why they changed that.

What it means, too, of course, is that what we're celebrating at New Year's is not a new year (the Earth orbits in a circle-like ellipse; where is the starting point?) but the point at which we watch the calendar change: an entirely human construct.

In which case the weird insistence by some that we can't celebrate the change of decade for another year is even more pointless, because it requires harking back to a traditional beginning that didn't even exist for another five hundred years.