Twenty Ten

Twenty ten. Wishing all you readers a Happy Twenty Ten. The year itself sounds like a sort of countdown moving in differences of ten. Twenty... ten....zero? The sound of this is not good so maybe 2010 is better... so will stick to that.

With the start of 2010 has started another big discussion. What do we call this decade or rather what do we call the years from 2010 to 2019. This is a dilemma that the world faces after every 100 years, but till now we have not been able to solve for it as there is no term for the decade of 10-19, whereas we have terms for all other decades, starting from the twenties and going up to the nineties. In fact, even the decade of 2000 to 2009 was coined a term called noughties.

Media houses, publications, social networking sites are all discussing and trying to solve for this dilemma. TOI even came up with a few options like calling this decade as tennies (sounds like a sport to me) or oughties and asked for the popular choice through a poll. People, of course, have different views and each one has his or her own preferences. Some even feel that we should call it the tweenies or some other such name. Someone even suggested that we need not bother as everything will come to an end by 2012 (Talk about movies influencing minds of people)

While people are bothering about what to call this decade I am thinking to go to the root cause of this problem. How did this problem get created in the first place? My mind goes back to the people who gave us all the numbers and who gave names to these numbers. It all started from there.

Whoever gave names to these numbers did not utilise his creativity to the fullest as he/she was very creative in giving names to numbers between 0 -20, but after that all the creativity fizzled out and laziness set in as all the numbers were given a common name for the entire stretch of ten numbers. Therefore numbers between 20 – 29 were all called twenty something and the same holds good for the number series after that.

It would have been much better if this creativity had fizzled out as soon as the number ten was reached because then in that case, the numbers between 10 – 19 would have been like:
Tenty One, Tenty Two, Tenty Three, Tenty Four, Tenty Five, Tenty Six, Tenty Seven, Tenty Eight and Tenty Nine

But since this would have sounded similar to Twenty series, the other option would have been to call it:
Ten One, TenTwo, Ten Three, Ten Four, Ten Five, Ten Six, Ten Seven, Ten Eight and Ten Nine.

So the question that comes to my mind is that should we solve for the smaller problem of what to call this decade or is there a bigger problem in the naming of the numbers and is there a possibility of changing that. I would like to end this blog with this thought in your minds….so that you can come back and comment on how you see the issue and what are the possible solutions.