Twenty-Ten or Two Thousand Ten?

Almost as important as Legal Education, marketing your law firm and polishing your public speaking skills ranks way up there in an estate planning law practice! After a brief conversation with our CEO, Sanford Fisch, he raised a point requiring some research! He felt consistency in the way we refer to 2010 was important… and I can’t agree more.

After bidding farewell to “Two Thousand Nine,” it’s likely that you’ll fight the urge this year to say “Two Thousand Ten.” It’s awkward if nothing else, to stammer along deciding how you want this new year to sound. Good debates are made of strong opinions on both sides of an argument! And we all love a good debate, don’t we? You can search and find support for whichever way you want to talk about this year or any year after this but I’m sticking with Twenty-Ten!

According to the National Association of Good Grammar, the Huffington Post and 600 followers on Facebook, along with countless other groups, the proper way to say 2010 is “Twenty-Ten.” The main reason being sited is that it flows with what we’ve all said for hundreds of years. If the Declaration of Independence had been signed in One Thousand Seven Hundred and Seventy-Six… maybe we could sneak by and say “Two-Thousand and Ten” now! The big debaters point out that because we said 1776, just as we say Columbus sailed in 1492, we should have been saying “Twenty” (-Oh-One, -Oh-Two, etc.) instead of “Two Thousand” for the past 9 years!

Personally I think we should be forgiven for saying Two Thousand – it would have been silly to say, “Twenty Hundred.” Then when the next year rolled around we’d all been trained to say “Two Thousand One” just like 2001: A Space Odyssey told us to do when it was released in 1968. By the time Two Thousand and Two rolled around what were we supposed to do? It’s never too late to correct our course! I’ve said Nineteen-Ten whenever it’s come up in conversation, I’m committed to saying Twenty-Ten… if for no other reason, it’s SHORTER by one syllable!