Pronunciation of the Names of Years

How do you pronounce the name of the first year of the 21^st century? Do you call it "Two Thousand One"? (If you think that it's pronounced "Two Thousand" then you're really off base!)

If you believe that the year 2001 should be pronounced "Two Thousand one", then let me ask you this: How did you pronounce a year like 1984? Did you call it "One Thousand Nine Hundred Eight Four"? Or did you simply call it "Nineteen Eighty Four"?

And how about the first year of the 20^th century? Was it called "One Thousand Nine Hundred One"? Or was it simply called "Nineteen Oh One"?

If 1901 was pronounced "Nineteen Oh One" then, to be consistent, 2001 should be pronounced "Twenty Oh One". (And similarly for 2002, 2003, etc.) Think about it...

Since the corresponding phrases ("Two Thousand One" vs. "Twenty Oh One", etc.) each have exactly the same number of syllables, everyone will probably continue using the inconsistent pronunciation ("Two thousand" something-or-other) for the next year or so. But it will be interesting to see what happens when the year 2010 comes around. Will it be called "Two Thousand Ten" (which equires four syllables)? Or will everybody suddenly revert back to the more consistent pronunciation of "Twenty Ten" (which requires only three  syllables)? Only time will tell...

A Better Voting Law

Voting is the democratic process in which we all get to express our choices about political issues and candidates. It is a process that requires both maturity and a fundamental understanding of the issues on the ballot. But how do we determine "maturity"? How can we measure "understanding"? Should we allow absolutely everyone to vote, or do we "gotta draw the line somewhere"?

Before a person is allowed to drive an automobile, he must first pass a series of tests to prove his proficiency and knowledge of the rules of the road. Perhaps it would be a good idea to require potential voters to pass a similar kind of proficiency test to prove that they can at least understand the issues on the ballot. Otherwise, without the requirement of such an understanding, we might just as well let little children have full voting rights too!

But such is not the "American way." To be eligible to vote, the only requirement is that you be a warm-bodied citizen older than some completely arbitrary cut-off age (usually 18). You are then equified into being "totally qualified" to vote, just like every other warm body in the country, even if you can't even spell your own name. So let's, for the time being, forget about requiring "understanding," and simply focus on the requirement of "maturity."

When does a person become "mature"? Unless you are the aforementioned warm body, you are probably astute enough to realize that, just as "day" does not mature into "night" at a specific point in time, so too does a "baby" not mature into an "adult" at any specific point in time. Maturity occurs gradually with time, and we therefore usually associate a person's maturity with their age.

Of course we can "pretend" that maturity occurs at some point, such as 18, or 21, or some other fixed number of years. But rather than playing such games of "make believe," let's instead look for a realistic solution to the voting issue. How can we use the reality that a person gradually matures to construct a realistic law for voting?

The answer is obvious. Yet, almost everyone with whom I've ever discussed the matter of voting has had trouble seeing it at first. And the reason for the difficulty is that almost everyone mistakenly assumes that voting has to be an all-or-nothing process (i.e., either you do vote, or else you don't vote).

To solve the voting issue, all we have to do is implement the concept of partial voting. No, partial voting doesn't mean voting on only some of the items on the ballot. (Nor does it mean keeping at least some part of your body outside of the voting booth!) Partial voting means nothing more than assigning a weight to the vote. A weight of 100 percent would produce one whole vote, and a weight of zero percent would be the equivalent of not voting at all.

Once the concept of a partial vote is acknowledged, we easily arrive at the:

Realistic Voting Law:

Every citizen would have the right to vote.
But each ballot would be assigned a weight
equal to the degree of maturity of the voter.

For example, a person with a 20 percent degree of maturity would have a vote that counts only one-fifth as much as an adult's vote. (So if the adult were to vote for an issue on the ballot, it would take five such partial voters voting against that issue to result in a wash.)

The Realistic Voting Law would be trivially easy to implement, even in our present society. When a person registers to vote, his/her birthday would be recorded by the registrar. On election day, all the ballots and the dates of birth of the corresponding voters would be put into the election computer. The computer would then simply multiply each vote by its corresponding degree of maturity before "adding up" all the votes.

The notion of a weighted vote is not a new idea, nor is it even an "un-American" concept. In fact it's the very way publicly-held corporations hold elections at their stockholder meetings. Everybody who owns stock in the company does not get one vote identically equal to every other stockholder's vote. Instead, each vote is weighted in direct proportion to how much stock the voter owns. The more stock that a person has in the company, the more that person's vote counts. In a very similar sense, the Realistic Voting Law could then be interpreted as a reflection of how much "stock" each voter has in "maturity."

In closing, let me ask you: How mature should children have to be before we start teaching them the value of saving money? Should we require that a person be at least 18 years of age before we give them their first piggy bank? Of course not. We should encourage children to start appreciating the value of money long before that age, not because their nickels and dimes are so intrinsically valuable, but because it helps to build responsible attitudes toward money. So too should it be with voting. What better way to start encouraging civic responsibility than to offer kids a voice (or more aptly, a "whisper") in our government, not because their tiny fractions of a vote would ever amount to anything significant, but because it would help build responsible attitudes toward government and society.

The "Correct" Way Of Specifying Calendar Dates

How do you express a number like "three hundred fifty two" using numerical digits instead of words? The arbitrarily established convention that we've adopted is to first write down the most significant digit (the one which represents the largest portion of the number, in this case the 3, since it represents "hundreds"), followed to the right by the next most significant digit (in this case the 5, since it represents "tens"), followed to the right by the least significant digit (in this case the 2, since it represents "ones"). Therefore the number would look like this:

352
(As an aside, the fact that we write the digits in this particular order is completely arbitrary. We could just have easily adopted some other convention, such as writing the same digits from right to left instead . And, had we chosen to write all of our numbers that way, then that convention would have been just as "correct" as the "left-to-right" method that we actually use. Of course 253 would then not indicate "two hundred fifty three.")

The left-to-right convention is also the way we express clock time. For example "four twenty seven and fifty one seconds" would be expressed by first writing the most significant portion (the hours), followed to the right by the next most significant portion (the minutes), followed to the right by the least significant portion (the seconds). Using colons to delimit each portion, the time would therefore be written as:

4:27:51
So then, why do so many of us (Americans, for example) express calendar time by writing the most significant portion (the year) in the right-most position? The correct (i.e., consistent) way to write a date would be to first write the most significant portion (the year), followed to the right by the next significant portion (the month), followed to the right by the least significant portion (the day). Therefore the correct way to express a date (for example, the date of the Apollo 11 lunar landing) would be:

1969 July 20
or, using only numbers, as:

1969/7/20
In fact, since clocks and calendars both indicate quantities of "time," the most consistent way of specifying time in general would be to combine those two separate concepts into one single concept. Any point in time could then be expressed in the single form:

year : month : day : hour : minute : second
where we would no longer require a separate delimiter (such as a "/") to be used only for the "date" portion.

Is 12 O'clock Noon AM or PM?

When specifying clock times it is impractical to try and interpret the meanings of AM and PM in their literal senses (i.e., "Ante Meridiem" and "Post Meridiem," respectively), because the meridian is defined in terms of a particular observer. Therefore local noon seldom (if ever) occurs exactly at "clock-time" noon (i.e., twelve o'clock). So if one were to interpret the meaninings of AM and PM literally, then the exact time at which "AM becomes PM" would not be at 12 o'clock, but would instead occur at different times for observers at different locations. Instead we should interpret AM as simply being a reference to the first half of the day, and PM as being a reference to the second half of the day.

Therefore, 12:00 noon is actually 12:00 AM, because 12:00 AM means that 12 hours of time have elapsed since the start of the first half of the day (i.e., since midnight). (To refer to noon as being 12:00 PM would be tantamount to making the clearly absurd claim that noon occurs 12 hours later than noon!)

(No, 12:01 in the afternoon is not PM either. It doesn't become PM until one o'clock.)

Still, there remains a nagging compulsion in the back of your mind. You're probably thinking: "If it's even as little as a fraction of a second into the afternoon, then it's just somehow got to be PM. After all, PM refers to the afternoon, doesn't it? So why can't we legitimately use PM?"

The answer is: We can! (But if we do, then we can no longer refer to the time as being 12 o'clock.) As we have already indicated, whenever we express a time in terms of PM hours, we are specifying (or counting) the number of hours (and minutes and seconds) that have elapsed since noon. So if we want to express noon itself as a PM time then all we have to do is count the number of hours between noon and itself. Therefore:

Noon can be expressed as Zero o'clock PM
And of course, by identical reasoning:

Midnight can be expressed as Zero o'clock AM
What? You say that your clock doesn't have a zero on it? Well, that's easy enough to fix. Just scrape off the twelve (which never should have been put there in the first place) and paste on a zero instead! After all, who in their right mind would ever want to suggest that we should begin counting things (such as the hours of a new day) by starting with -- twelve!

(When I presented this information on one of my radio shows several years ago, a listener came down to the station the next day and presented me with just such a clock on which he had carefully replaced the twelve with a zero! That clock is still mounted on the wall in the lobby at KSCO.)

"Twenty for Five Dollars"

I just returned from shopping at a grocery store in which some of their items were priced at "Twenty For Five Dollars". After calculating for a moment, it was easy to see that the items were selling for 25 cents apiece.

Now why couldn't they have just said that in the first place?

If I had wanted to buy twenty of them (which I didn't ), I could have easily calculated the cost myself. Instead, they made me first divide 5 dollars by 20 to obtain the per item price. And then I had to multiply that quotient by the number of items that I actually wanted.

I realize that the store's managers price things that way in the hopes that you will be stupid enough to actually buy twenty of them. But their little strategy backfires when it comes to me. As a kind of protest, whenever I encounter such silly pricing tactics I purposely buy less than the suggested number of items, even if I had originally intended otherwise!

"Uncorrect" English!

It seems to me that the prefix "un-" is being used improperly a lot. "Un-" should be used to indicate a kind of "reverse" process in which something is returned to a former state of existence. For example:

• If you tie your shoe laces, you can untie them.


• If a door has been locked and you have the key, you can unlock the door.


• In general, if you can talk about doing something, then you can talk about undoing it.

In contrast, prefixes like "non-", "im-", etc. should be used to indicate the notion of "not". For example:

• If someone is immature, they are not mature.


• A non-smoker is someone who does not smoke.


• If something is inappropriate, it is not appropriate.

and so on.

But these two quite distinct concepts ("reverse" vs. "not") have somehow gotten confused in the present-day English language. For example, we often hear expressions like:

• "Seven-Up is the Un-Cola!" (Does that mean that it used to be a cola, but now it no longer is?)


• "I am totally unfamiliar with computer programming." (Does that mean that you used to be familiar with it, but have now forgotten everything that you once knew?)


• "The statement: 'Two plus two equals five' is untrue." (Is it really possible that two plus two did equal five at one time!?)


• "Some things are better left unsaid." (How does someone "unsay" something? Do they somehow suck their words back into their mouth?)


• "Uncooked vegetables contain more vitamins than cooked ones." (Uncooked?) [Well... I think you get the picture by now.]

Yeah, yeah... I realize that all of these expressions are considered to be examples of proper and correct English. And that's why we need to start thinking about "uncorrecting" English!  :-)

"Hurry! Hurry! Get Your FREE..."

When I was a kid, there were stores that actually gave away certain things. For example, grocery stores would occasionally give away free samples of a product (such as a breakfast cereal) that you could take home with you and try. And you didn't have to buy anything to get those free samples.

But today, the term "Free" seems to have taken on a new meaning. To get something "Free" these days requires you to spend money to get it!



If you have to buy something in order to get an item for "Free" then the item isn't really Free. It would be more accurate to say that the item is available "at no extra cost." (But it certainly isn't "Free"!)