Everybody seems to agree that this year is 'two thousand and five'. It bis not 'twenty oh five' yet 1905 is 'nineteen oh five' as often as not.
What follows? Will we say 2011 is 'two thousand eleven' or 'twenty eleven' ? What of more distant dates? When we talk of a long lease to 2111 , surely we shall not normally say that it ends, in 'two thousand one hundred and eleven', will we, but in 'twenty- one eleven? [All right, lawyers shall, and British ones will certainly say 'shall' too and add 'by effluxion of time' for good measure ]
Taking that latter assumption as correct, of what date will we first start saying 'twenty ' rather than 'two thousand'?
Professor Crystal ( not a children's entertainer or a clairvoyant, but a real professor of linguistics, honest !) maintains that we all have a sense of rhythm in speech.Somehow 'two thousand and five' sounds right; but what of the rest? His learned discussion in the London Times, verging on the maikuesque, is strong on question but not on prediction. Any ideas?
Even in 1968, when "2001: A Space Odyssey" was showing, a minority of movie-goers were saying "twenty-oh-one." By logic and tradition of the preceding centuries, that's what we would say. But since when do we follow tradition!
Taken strictly as a number (say, if you were writing a check in that dollar amount), 2005 would be correctly "two thousand five" (names of whole numbers never include the word "and"), making it just four syllables and a better contender. "Twenty-aught-five" -- the other alternative -- certainly sounds arcane and archaic.
By 2010, I'd think that "twenty ten" would be preferred. Surely nobody will call 2020 anything but "twnety-twenty."
Just have the patience to wait and see...
Posts: 1973 | Location: U.S. | Registered: 06-03-02
" Names of whole numbers never include the word 'and' " ? They do in the world where we speak traditional English The omission is another example of American abbreviation such as saying 'He met someone Monday' or 'He protested the result' where English people would have 'on Monday' and 'at' or 'about' or 'over' or 'against' the result.See, you are always in such a hurry
Do you say 'one hundred five' for 105, and so on, too ?
Yes, that's the way I remember learning it...so it must be right. Fred, you've sent me to my personal library, where not one book on grammar or usage mentions this issue. Not even Strunk & White, which is, after all, too skinny of a book.
So I had to search the Internet to justify my statement. I found The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation, which says "Use the word and only where the decimal point appears in the figure format." I found a kids' site called Math Cats where you type in the numerals and it writes out the number -- with the notable absence of and.
Q. In the admittedly rare circumstances when you want to write out the name of a large number, are there any agreed-upon guidelines for the usage of the word “and”? Is it “six hundred seventy-two” or “six hundred and seventy-two”? I was taught the former in grade school; a colleague was taught the latter, equally adamantly. I should note that said colleague is Canadian; is this perhaps a question of American versus British usage? All consulted manuals are, inexplicably, silent on the matter.
A. As paragraph 9.5 in the fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style suggests, using and is a matter of personal preference. For many people it is more idiomatic to say “one hundred and ten,” and, therefore, perhaps especially in less formal writing, it can be written that way as well. In some contexts, caution is advisable, however. Look at the following two expressions:
six hundred seventy-two
six hundred and seventy two
The latter expression could possibly be construed as two numbers: 600, on the one hand, and 72, on the other. But in the majority of contexts there would be no reason to worry.
We could look to Disney, whose 101 Dalmatians is usually spoken as "A hundred and one..." But then these are the same people who gave us Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, when of course it should be Shrank.
Anyhow, I admit [that] I was too quick to make such a dogmatic pronouncement. It, um, runs in my family.
Posts: 1973 | Location: U.S. | Registered: 06-03-02
There's a third way, Professor. Hearing that depends on where you go to auctions here. The downmarket auctioneers often say " one ten; one twenty; one thirty". The better, classier, ones say the figures in full : " one hundred and ten..." So if you are bidding at Cambridge market you'll likely hear the former but if you are at Sotheby's in London it is the latter you'll hear. That said, even at Cambridge you won't hear " one hundred ten".
'Shrank' ? We would say that someone shrunk the clothes , the kids etc, not that they shrank them. However , 'shrank' survives in one usage viz. to describe someone in fear as in ' he shrank back at the approach of the killer'. Even then you'd be as likely to hear 'shrunk back'. People learn phrases and this seems to be an instance where 'shrank', otherwise archaic to us,has survived in a hackneyed expression.
Yeah , Colin, but Carlisle is only just in England. Seriously there must be , or have been,many places in England where verb forms differ; where did the Americans get them if not from England or, perhaps, your original near neighbours in Scotland ? Somebody in England may say 'dove' for 'dived', for example. What is curious is that 'shrank' has survived in 'he shrank back in fear' even among those of us who say 'shrunk the clothes'.
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The omission is another example of American abbreviation such as saying 'He met someone Monday' or 'He protested the result' where English people would have 'on Monday' and 'at' or 'about' or 'over' or 'against' the result.See, you are always in such a hurry 
