Since I've decided to refer to the year as "twenty thirteen" instead of "two thousand thirteen," I have been paying attention to how other people say it, especially on radio and television news broadcasts where years get bandied about a lot.
Predictably, it's a mix. Some people say it one way and some the other way. The same is true for other years too, but I started to notice a trend. It seemed to me that when referring to the years 2001 through 2009, people usually said "two thousand n," but for the years since, "twenty n" was used more often.
I got confirmation of that this morning when I heard both used in the same sentence. A reporter on NPR was talking about things that happened "in two thousand eight and twenty ten."
I wonder if they had this same kind of confusion back in the 11th Century, in the years between, say, one thousand four and ten sixty-six.
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