{"id":3343,"date":"2019-12-27T07:51:33","date_gmt":"2019-12-27T13:51:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/?p=3343"},"modified":"2019-12-27T07:51:34","modified_gmt":"2019-12-27T13:51:34","slug":"sorry-its-not-the-end-of-a-decade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/sorry-its-not-the-end-of-a-decade\/","title":{"rendered":"Sorry, It’s Not The End of a Decade"},"content":{"rendered":"

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As 2019 draws to a close, we are barraged with \u201cBest of the Decade\u201d lists. One of the New Yorker\u2019s<\/em> film critics published his favorite movies of the past 10 years. I have not seen any of them and have only heard of a couple. Variety<\/em> did the same with music albums, presented by three critics. Of the 30 listed, I had actually heard of about half the artists and own the work of one on the list \u2014 Kacey Musgraves, an East Texas native.<\/p>\n

And on it goes. WalletHub ranked the least-caring cities of the decade, with Birmingham, Alabama taking the top (or low) spot on the list, edging out San Bernardino, California and Laredo, Texas in its care for the community, the vulnerable and its workforce. Food and Wine<\/em> ranked the nation\u2019s most-beloved grocery stores of the past decade, with Wegmans topping the chart. One would have to travel to the East Coast to shop at a Wegmans, though expansion is slowly bringing the chain into the South. H-E-B-owned Central Market, prominent in larger Texas cities, came in second place. There were rankings for best and worst airports, most effective hair dryers and the top fashionistas of the decade.<\/p>\n

There is just one problem with all these lists and punditry about the close of the decade. It is not the end of the decade!<\/em> \u00a0That does not come until Dec. 31, 2020. Bear with me here. I have done my research, clicking on Google and poring over such authoritative sources as the Farmer\u2019s Almanac<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Most of the world has used the Gregorian calendar since its establishment in 1582. It established leap years as coming every four years for the most part \u2014 2020 is a leap year \u2014 to accurately account for the actual time it takes for the earth to orbit a single time around the sun. This was a successor to a system created by a monk known as the Venerable Bede in 731. He was expanding a calendar created by another monk two centuries earlier. Dionysius \"\"<\/a>Exiguus in 525 calculated\u00a0 \u2014 \u00a0inaccurately, as it turns out \u2014 when Christ was born but ignored the thousands of years preceding his birth. Then, Venerable Bede created Before Christ, or B.C. to count those years, which far outnumber the centuries after Christ\u2019s birth. Anno Domini (Latin for \u201cin the year of Our Lord) started with 1 AD, not zero. The year before 1 AD is 1 BC.<\/p>\n

Thus, each decade starts with \u201c1.\u201d This came up at the close of the millennium, 20 years ago during the Y2K scare. Folks were freaking out about the rollover from 1999 to 2000, because some surmised computers would cease to function, since their calendars wouldn\u2019t roll over correctly. The computers would think it was 1900, not 2000. We would all revert to driving horse and buggies and have to do without television.<\/p>\n

OK, not really, but I spent New Year\u2019s Eve of 1999 sitting in the office of The Daily Sentinel<\/em> in Nacogdoches, waiting for the clock to strike midnight to ensure technological disaster did not ensue. Not that I was equipped to do anything about it, but somebody had to stay on board the possibly sinking ship. Of course, nothing happened. I left the office and went over a friend\u2019s house. He worked for the phone company and also pulled sentry duty. We toasted the New Year about 12:30 a.m. And technically, 2000 was the last year of the 20th<\/sup> century, not the first year of the 21st<\/sup>. Further confusing matters, the next 10 years will be known collectively as the 2020s, or maybe just the \u201920s.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, I published a biography of H.B. (Henry) Fox, the Circleville Philosopher. Fox married into a newspaper family. In 1950, he was publishing the Taylor Times<\/em> in Central Texas, while his brother-in-law was publisher of the Frankston Citizen<\/em> in East Texas.<\/p>\n

Fox proclaimed the end of 1949 as the end of the first half of the 20th<\/sup> century. His brother-in-law, the colorfully named Quanah Price, took issue in print. Editors, especially if they were kin, enjoyed sniping at each other in the newspaper columns. That\u2019s how Henry met his wife, who worked for her brother. They began making fun of each other, eventually married, and continued their good-natured repartee for many decades. (You\u2019ll have to buy the book to learn more. Go here to do so: https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/books\/yours-faithfully-j-a\/<\/a> )<\/p>\n

Quanah wrote:<\/p>\n

There are one hundred years in a century. Everybody believes that. So there are 500 years in five centuries, 1100 years in eleven centuries and 1900 years in 19 centuries. And the 20th<\/sup> Century couldn\u2019t start until the last of the 19th<\/sup> Century\u2019s hundred years was used up. See?<\/em><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think Henry Fox ever budged on the issue, citing then-President Harry Truman, who held similar views on the calendar. Quanah noted in response that, \u201cthis isn\u2019t the first time a New Deal politician made a mathematical error. It\u2019s commonly known that those fellows just naturally are weak when it comes to such things as figures.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, on Dec. 31, 2019, at midnight I will raise a toast to the last year of the second decade of this century. That is, if I\u2019m still awake.<\/p>\n

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