And a Happy New Year

[Tdol]

Here's wishing all the best for the New Year.

[emsr2d2]

Here's to a fabulous 2020 for everyone!

[jutfrank]

Happy New Year, everyone.

[Yankee]

Happy New Year Everyone. Just remember, "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like bananas".

[Glizdka]

And so, the last -teen year in my life has ended.

[jutfrank]

Goodbye teens (tens?), hello twenties.

Language question: How do we refer to the passing decade? Is it the teens or the tens or something else? When prefaced with twenty, the twenty-teens sounds wrong, but without twenty, the tens sounds wrong too!

[emsr2d2]

The "tens" seems to be the decade of every century that needs to be preceded by the first part of the year name.

[Tdol]

And so, the last -teen year in my life has ended.

Don't worry- it gets far worse than that. My wife and I dropped in a museum about trains at a station while waiting for a train a few days ago, and they had a ticket machine there as a museum piece that I remember from when I first came to Japan. When you are a museum piece in a foreign country, you are really getting old.

[Glizdka]

Language question: How do we refer to the passing decade? Is it the teens or the tens or something else? When prefaced with twenty, the twenty-teens sounds wrong, but without twenty, the tens sounds wrong too!

I think the wrongness of twenty-teens lies in -ty and -teen being so close together. It sounds like an unmathematical number.

To me, tens sounds like a broad answer to "How many?", much like hundreds, thousands, millions ("Millions were killed").

Is the year 2020 still in the 201st decade? Since there was no year 0, the first decade is from 1 to 10, the second decade from 11 to 20, and the 202nd decade from 2011 to 2020.

[jutfrank]

Since there was no year 0, the first decade is from 1 to 10, the second decade from 11 to 20, and the 201st decade from 2011 to 2020.

Good point.

You've highlighted a distinction between historical and mathematical ways of counting periods of time. Historically speaking, the year 2020 belongs in the decade 2020-2029 (i.e., the 20s) whereas mathematically speaking, it is the final year in the second decade of the millennium, which runs 2011-2020.

Mind you, we don't usually need to think of years as numbers on a numberline. They're normally just used to mark points on a timeline.