My First Guest Blog... "Oh-Ten"

People are already planning for next year--promising, strategizing, and setting their calendars for Vegas. I’m sure that they’ve already crafted some resolutions they won’t keep. Normally it wouldn’t bother me, but this year it drives me up the wall. You know why? Because they talk about their plans in oh-ten. Everyone’s shorthand for next year is oh-ten. Is it too hard to say ten, plain and simple?

When you think about it, saying oh-ten isn’t actually wrong. It’s technically still right, because there is a zero before the 10. It’s a big change, though, because you’re tacking on the hundreds place to what we say. We have been saying two-digit numbers for as long as I can remember. People talk about ’57 Chevys. The Berlin Wall fell in ’89. Jay-Z rapped about the 9-8. The big election of this decade was covered by in-decision ’08. All of a sudden, we’re going to have ‘010?

The way that I see it, there are two reasons people might do this. First, it might be that they are slow to change old habits after saying oh-something for nine years. Second, it might seem natural to continue using the oh, because ten is a one-syllable number. Hopefully they don’t say it because they think it sounds cool; it doesn’t.

When it comes down to it, I really just support consistency. If we want to switch to three digits, a new decade is a great time to start. I just don’t see that happening, though. What are we going to say for the rest of the new decade? Oh-eleven? Doubt it. Oh-thirteen? You won’t hear it from me, nor anyone else I bet. That means this year will be an anomaly; it will be the only year in which we say a three-digit abbreviation. I hope everyone will keep 2010 from being weird and come back to our tried-and-true, two-digit tradition. Just say ten.