Not just a new year but a new decade!
By John Welford
@indexer (4852)
Leicester, England
December 31, 2020 11:59am CST
It surprises me that very little notice seems to have been taken of the fact that 2021 will be the first year of a new decade, namely the 2020s!
I assume that this is because people continue to make the mistake of supposing that counting to ten starts with the number 0 and not the number 1! After you count to 10 - the last digit of which is 0 - you move on to 11, with the last digit being 1!
The same mistake was made in the year 2000, when people thought they had started a new century and millennium. This was just plain wrong - centuries start with a year ending in 1, meaning that the 21st century began in 2001. not 2000.
The Victorians did not make this mistake. Check any newspaper of the time and you will not find any of them welcoming the start of the 20th century on 1st January 1900 - this only happened on 1st January 1901. Earlier generations also did not think that decades started when the year ended with a zero, only when it ended with a 1.
So I will gladly take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy new decade as well as a happy new year!
7 people like this
4 responses
@arunima25 (93194)
• Bangalore, India
31 Dec 20
Happy new year and a happy new decade. 
I have just said the same thing to my husband few minutes back and here I find a post on the same on mylot. 


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