I was talking with a friend who wanted to know when my novel was coming out. [1. And no, I don’t get tired of saying that. Also, totally doesn’t seem real.] “I don’t have a real date yet, just sometime in 2010.”
The funny thing is that 2010 sounds like it’s decades away and it’s not. It’s just next year. I think I’ve just spent so long with 2010 being a science-fictional date that it’s hard to make sense of it as a real date.
That’s how I felt about 1984.
That is funny and not something I’d thought of.
I think it’s because it’s the first year we will consistently name as “twenty-whatever.” Up to now, the new millennium years have been named “oh-whatever” (oh-eight, oh-nine). But twenty-something is the way the future has always been described in science fiction.
Oh. Yes, I think that’s it. It’s the word “twenty” that’s making it feel so far away and science-fictional.
I remember seeing that movie and thinking that year would take forever to get here. I would be over 40 years-old, and everything! Sigh, now it is just around the corner.
But, hey, we have a book to look forward to.
Yeah, what Karen said. Also we’ll have to come up with the term for the decade because we can no longer call it the whatever-ties (like 70s, 80s, 90s).
It’s also like there’s no difference in saying “see you tomorrow” and “see you next year” on December 31, but they feel different.
You know what they called the decade in 1880? The eighties. 1790? The nineties. I have no idea about the 1690s, but some patterns just stick around.
Hm, that is true. So what did people call those 1800 and 1900 years?
The aughts, but that was a term used for zero that has since gone all archaic on us.