Welcome to 2012!
OK, pop quiz: When you silently read that opening sentence to yourself, how did you pronounce the name of the year? Did you a) think “two thousand twelve,” b) think “twenty-twelve,” or c) stop, paralyzed with uncertainty?
If you chose option c, you’re like a lot of English speakers, who seem profoundly unresolved on something that might seem very basic: what the year is called.
If all we cared about were ease of pronunciation, then the quick “twenty-twelve” would be the obvious choice. (One could imagine the old Strunk and White dictum “Omit Needless Words” modified as “Omit Needless Syllables.”) But not everyone is on board with the more succinct “twenty-” pronunciation of the names of years.
This comes as a surprise to some observers of English usage. From 2001 to 2009, it made sense to use the longer “two thousand” version of year names. The template was actually set way back in 1968, when Stanley Kubrick’s movie “2001” was marketed as “two thousand and one,” not “twenty oh one” — despite the precedent of pronouncing 1901 as “nineteen oh one” (or “nineteen aught one” if you want to sound particularly old-timey).
But two years ago, when the calendar turned to 2010 and we left the aughts behind, many assumed that the “two thousand” style would take its leave. In January 2010, when the American Dialect Society held its Word of the Year voting, the “twenty-” prefix was selected as Most Likely to Succeed, with the expectation that 2010 would be called “twenty-ten,” 2011 would be “twenty-eleven,” and so forth.
David Crystal, author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, made a similar prediction at the time. “Based on past centuries, speech is more likely to go for the shorter version,” he wrote on his blog. “It’s rare to hear ‘in nineteen hundred and ten.’ And I’ve never heard Tchaikovsky’s overture called ‘eighteen hundred and twelve.’”
As we grow to think of the 21st century as an era with a distinct identity, it stands to reason that we would use the “twenty-” style as a way to mark years as part of that era, just as we have done with the “eighteen-” and “nineteen-” prefixes. Though pronunciation has moved in that direction, the “two thousand” habit has proved remarkably difficult to break after a decade of use.