One of our New Year’s resolutions around Casa Jennings is to start pronouncing 2010 “twenty-ten” instead of “two-thousand-and-ten.” Did we worry about Y2K back in “one-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine”? More to the point, did the Norman Conquest take place in “one-thousand-sixty-six”? It did not! The “two-thousand-and” formulation is all Stanley Kubrick’s fault and it’s an abomination. I can see why “twenty-oh-one” sounds a little odd, but enough’s enough already. We putzed around for a decade instead of taking strong, decisive action. It ends here.

Getting used to “twenty-” before the year is going to be hard, but Mindy pointed out that the real test of our modern-ness will come when we start to leave it off. In the last century, we could say that we graduated from high school in “ninety-two” or re-elected Clinton in “ninety-six” or quit Sterling Cooper in “sixty-three.” So far, that’s been hard in the new millennium. Was the World Trade Center attacked back in “one”? Or “aught-one”? Somehow the lingo of barbershop quartets and handlebar mustaches doesn’t seem to go very well with the Bush years. (Insert political punchline here.) Even “oh-one” doesn’t trip off the tongue quite as neatly as “eighty-one” or “ninety-one” did.

But look at the calendar: it’s 2010! We’ve gotten past the awkward oh/aught problem! Are we now comfortable saying “The economy will rebound in ‘ten’” or “I can’t wait for the London Olympics in ‘twelve’”?

My guess is no. We still have a long way to go.