Friday, May 22, 2009

It's Not "Oh-Ten"

I've been in planning meetings for three of my non-profit boards in the last couple of weeks, and at every one of them, someone referred to next year as "oh-ten" (as in "twenty oh-ten"). The third time I heard it, I'm afraid that I snapped, "It's not oh-ten, it's ten -- just ten." But was I right? I checked Yahoo! Answers to resolve this burning question -- and someone had asked it just three weeks ago: Is 2010 called '10 or oh-ten for short? - Yahoo! Answers.
I'll save you the suspense -- as Mandy said on Yahoo!, "It's just 10." But something tells me we'll get back in the habit of treating the years as consisting of two two-digit number (like 'nineteen ninety-nine") and start saying "twenty" before the year, because simply saying "ten," "eleven," "twelve" and so on just sound weird.

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