There’s nothing more annoying than having people mispronounce the year. It started in 2010 when people actually said out loud, “Two Thousand and Ten” to identify the year. It’s even worse this year when people say, “Two Thousand and Eleven.” Here is the correct way to pronounce those years: “Twenty Ten” and “Twenty Eleven.” This “proper year pronunciation” is such a big problem that fellow WordPress.com-er Gus Pearcy created a blog — SAY Twenty Eleven — just to set people right; and I have borrowed one of Gus’ images to help spread the appropriate learning meme:
Gus is sort of kidding with his blog in some ways, but I’m deadly serious! Pronounce the year the right way! You don’t say, “One Thousand Nine Hundred and Sixty-Seven” for the year 1967 do you? Of course you don’t, unless you have ranch dressing in your hair!
The Boles Blog Network blogs all run on the famous WordPress.com Twenty Ten theme — and there’s you’re first clue that 2010 is, indeed, pronounced “Twenty Ten” because the WordPress.com Gods said so a year ago when that theme made its debut, in the year of its naming, as the new default for millions of blogs:
Over the weekend, we turned on a new theme called Twenty Ten. Twenty Ten is a big deal for us — it’s our first update to the “default” theme (the one you see when you start a new blog) on WordPress.com. Our goal with Twenty Ten was to create something stylish, customizable, simple, and most of all, readable. Since every new WordPress.com user will be seeing Twenty Ten, we wanted to design an example of what a WordPress theme can do — that meant inventing some new features as well as utilizing a few that you may not know about yet.
Everything is in the understanding, the whole is in the memeing, and the year deserves your proper attention and correct pronunciation. Do it for you. Do it for clarity and unification. Do it for a narrow sense of the higher self in an over-enunciated world.
Oh, and yes, the correct pronunciation for the year 2000 was, and still is, “Twenty Aught Aught.”
We thank you.