How to Say the Years: Why it Matters

Concluding a month of pronouncing our decades. So— who cares? If people don't say "teens" or “twenty-ohs" the world won't end, right?

Well, maybe it will, as we know it.

As a young historian I looked down on people discussing history in decades, as was common then. "Kids in the sixties rebelled." "Omigod that looks so eighties!" But now I think that was a pretty good periodization. A handy medium resolution like county-level maps. It was a narrative framework, and even a thesis production line. It nudged us toward looking bigger-picture and coming to conclusions.

And you can't do that if you can't say the words. How were the ohs, after all? What do we make of the teens? Even now in the twenties, a decade we could easily say, we haven't gone back to the habit. I mean, what would look twenties?

Worse, the void was filled by generations. Now we talk in terms of the supposed sequels to the Baby Boom: "Gen Z," "Millennials," and so forth. We've gone from a discourse of shared experience to one of division. From tracking big change to just yapping about yourself. From community to its cheap substitute identity.

And boy we have some big lethal rocks before the ship of state, some challenges to global civilization. We need to be able to talk about where we're going.

You thought I'd never get landscape this month, didn't you? History has its ::s to geometric and radiometric resolutions, and is defined by the medium one. And don't say "fourteenth century!" Alicia Parlapiano, "There Are Many Ways to Map Election Results. We’ve Tried Most of Them," New York Times, 1 November 2016. My cartogram's better. Robert Wellman Campbell, "Political Cartograms: The Electoral College," RSS Longa, 31 October 2024, public domain via CC0 1.0. Robert Wellman Campbell, "How to Say the Years: Why it Matters," RSS Longa, 26 March 2026, public domain via CC0 1.0.