Ok, I’ve had it. I have been quietly putting up with this nonsense since at least elementary school and what I thought was silly back then, I still think is silly now: Why do we have to use that stupid system whereby the 1900s is called the 20th century, the 1600s is called the 17th century, and so on?
Yes, yes, I understand perfectly well “why” on the technical level that things ended up like this but it’s a damn nuisance I tell you! I know it doesn’t take much mental processing to adjust been the two, but it still takes a fraction of a second in my head to switch back and forth between number dates and which “th century” it is in. If you add all those fractions of a second together, for all of humanity, just think of the number of brilliant works of literature an army of monkeys at the typewriters could have generated? Ok, maybe not that many, but still…it is really starting to bother me.
As long as you operate mainly in one or two centuries, this is really no big deal. However, for PhD oral exams I have one reading field which stretches across almost half a dozen centuries (Early Modern European Intellectual History). When you are zooming out quite far and talking about key “moments” in history where there is a significant change in the intellectual, religious, technological or economic environment, we often only commit which “[early|middle of the|late] *th century” that change took place. This part of my memory doesn’t nicely link up with the mass of events and other dates in the **** format. I would like to believe that I’m not the only one who has this problem. Although I’m surely not the first to do so, I hereby recommend that both for our own memory’s sake and for the benefit of all our future students, we completely abandon the silly “*th century” method of dating.
From now on, and until I am offered some better way of doing it, when I want to talk about the 17th century, I’ll say 1600s, and when I want to talk about the 19th century, I’ll say the 1800s. If that is not “sophisticated” enough for some people, well…to hell with them. And as for people teaching and researching history related to years 1-100 – you can sort it out yourself, it is not our problem that you are missing a digit, or two, or three.
I like the century numbered shorthand, myself, and never really had a problem with it.
But my students, on the other hand, seem incapable of making sense of it, so now when I’m teaching (or otherwise talking), I’ll usually say “X century ([X-1]00s)” just about every time.
The advantage the century number has is that you can pull off such absurdities as “the long 19th century” or starting the “20th century” in 1914….
Hmmm…Well, if you want to be sophisticated about it, you could always preface any talk by saying you’ll be using a proprietary dating system for convenience, where the year 1 = year 0, and years 0-99 equals the 0th century, and then you can refer to the 1900s as the 19th century and leave your audience to figure out what you’re saying ;). Start referring to this as the muninn dating system and you may start a trend!
I would be happy to accept some shorter system, so that we can refer to them in fewer syllables (and, if one insists, use the word century) and the existing system does, as you say, allow a term to establish a connection between some period and the years it is related to.
However, I see no real need for it. If you are talking about the late 1600s, or the mid-1600s…the numbered shorthand is actually one more syllable to say and a fraction of a second more to mentally convert at some point.
What I dislike is the fact that dates with, for example, 16 in it clash in my head with something with 17 in it that it is supposed to equal…it is just irrational and unnecessary extra burden on my very bad memory. :-) If it is true that students also struggle with this – why bother? Why not just begin the process of phasing it out? Although we are still left with numbers, it might also marginally help reduce the sometimes not so subtle way that this artificial numbering of the centuries have created temporal categories in historical study.
Personally, I have serious doubts about any century, or near century, having really enough unity to merit the absurdities that you mention…If not, getting rid of the artificial unity that century terminology creates might have an additional benefit…
Hehe, thanks for that Mark….reminds me a bit of programming….I always have trouble switching back and forth between programming languages in which Arrays start with 0 and those programming languages whose array counters start at 1. When you refer to Array item 20, you may be referring to the 21st item or the 20th item depending on which language you are programming in…
That is fine, I can handle the fact that there are different systems in different languages. However…what we currently have in history is worse….it would be like having a single programming language in which the array called Century item 20 (Century[20]) suddenly becomes 19 when you refer to the hundred items within a second array in it: Century[19][84] is the 84th entry of item 20. We have a 0 based array system, but which switches to a 1 based array system in the same language…
It gets more unwieldy in the future: “the two-thousand one hundreds”, etc. Mark’s system has a longer litefime in that respect.