Hacker News Reader

Not wrong. Gregorian starts at year 1. If you want a decade to be 10 years, it can't end with 10, that would be only 9 years.

Daily usage differs from that definition of course, but that's not the point.

View on HN

No you are wrong - The word 'decade' is not tied to any specific set of 10 years, so you can mark off any set of 10 years and call it a decade: 2000-2009, or 2005-2014, for example. By your logic the year 2000 should be part of the 90's which it wasn't.

I'm not wrong. Read the "specs".

>By your logic the year 2000 should be part of the 90's which it wasn't.

It was according to the gregorian calendar.

but you're still wrong - this decade ends at the last moment of 2019..that's the agreed popular opinion - didn't you even read the Wikipedia link?

Yes wrong. The first decade was either 9 or 10 years (depending on whether you want to be weird and include 1 BC), every decade after that was 10 years starting at 'X0 and ending at 'X9. This is how the common usage defines the term.

A lot of concepts in daily human lives get fuzzy near the edges. That's not a failing on humans, that's how language works. This isn't scientific or perfectly rational, yes, but neither are humans.

Yes this is common usage. I'll use it that way too. It's still wrong based on the calendar.

It's not an edge case though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com