How Are We Going to Pronounce 2010?

2009 is almost over. As we all know, the end of the year signals the beginning of a new one, which in turn brings up a great deal of questions: Who am I going to meet? Am I going to be moving? What new things will happen to me this year?

Some of us out there, though, are left with a simpler question. Just how on Earth are we going to pronounce the year 2010?

Since the year 2000 and the infamous Y2K fiasco, we've been content to pronounce the date very literally; just as 2000 was "two-thousand," 2001 was "two thousand one," and even this last year, 2009 was "two thousand nine," one might naturally assume that 2010 will follow the same pattern.

One might also offer the evidence that in this stir of apocalyptic 2012 rumors, most people still pronounce it the longer way. This was also the case in all the buzz and promotion for the recent movie of the same name. Since 2012 is still a few years off, this would seem to make a good case.

Let's be honest, though. Isn't "two-thousand-twelve" or especially "two-thousand-and-twelve," just a bit of a mouthful?

Also, it's hard not to wonder why we wouldn't go back to our old practices. Back in the 1900's, we never would've pronounced the year 1998 as "one-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-eight," as somewhere along the lines we instead adopted the more streamlined process of basically throwing a hyphen in the center and calling it "19-98." So it would seem most likely that we'd end up referring to 2010 as "20-10," which is in fact what ads for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics next year are already doing.

At the same time, though, why aren't we calling the current year "20-09?"Is it really that awkward to say it that way? What's the logic behind it?

The unfortunate answer there is that, honestly, there is no logic. People are going to refer to the year in whatever way they refer to it and a trend will form from whatever consensus is reached. The most probable assumption to me, however, is that it will take people a little while to adjust from "two-thousand-nine" to "20-10," so it might be split across the middle for a few years, maybe even until the latter half of the decade, where people will jump more willingly into saying things like 20-15, 20-16 and so on.

Or maybe a little under century from now, society will be readying itself for the year two-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine. Only time will tell.