Random Thoughts from a Sick Mind

[athelind]

... "sick mind" as in "staying home sick today with weird sinus-related wooziness", which is leaving my brain making strange, dissociated, random observations.

And I get to share!

Have you ever noticed that people who vehemently insist that the new century/millennium began in 2001, and you're an illiterate idiot if you suggest that any other opinion might possibly be valid, will still refer to a movie made in 1980 as an "Eighties Movie"?

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Comments

[kymri.livejournal.com]

In my opinion, though, an "80s movie" has less to do with when it was made and more with how. Most of the stuff that we tend to think of as TOTALLY 80s or whatever was created between 1982 and 1993ish, though there's no hard and fast rule. This applies to music as well; we think of disco largely as a late 70s phenomenon but it wasn't dead yet when Reagan was in office.

That said, I think the century/millenium think is open to debate. I tend to think of '2000' as the start of the new millenium emotionally, but then I wonder 'What, as there a year 0 A.D.?' So i don't know. The bigger brains can decide that one.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention this - I was thinking about it as a gestalt thing too. So to me 2000 doesn't feel like the new millenium, 'cause I associate "the new millenium" with Dubya and the recession. I can back you up that most of what I think of as 80s winds up technically being mid to late 80s, but I have memory loss and grew up in quasi-rural Georgia, both of which really screw with my perception.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Honestly, for me, the "new millennium" started ten years ago yesterday.

[paka.livejournal.com]

That, actually, is part of the gestalt for me. Even though technically there was most of a year between the election and the consequences, and 9/11 and those consequences, they're both such big THIS IS WHAT THE BUSH YEARS WERE ABOUT that they wind up getting mentally linked. How's that for irrational thinking?

[foofers.livejournal.com]

You're assuming that millennial and decade quantization occur on the same thresholds.

A decade, generically speaking, is any ten year span. A millennium is any thousand year span.

When you start referring to them with proper titles, as in "the 1980s" the semantics may be different, and aren't necessarily the same across the different interval and title types. With certain titles, that whole "no year zero" thing may take effect. Or not.

Thus, "The 1900s" and "The Twentieth Century" both refer to a period of one century, but not quantized to the same starting and ending points; the former being 1900 through 1999, the latter being 1901 through 2000. Overlapping, both 100 years long, but not the same century, strictly speaking. One's based on the placement of digits, the other on the idea that the First Century would start in Year One. So, along these lines, "The 1980s" can include 1980 without having to include 1990, and "The Second Millennium" can include 2000 without including 1000. "The 198th Decade" and "the 2000s" would be different. It's logical and consistent, as long as you can detach the generic concept of the time intervals from the specific proper title versions.

I have no butthurt about "millennial" celebrations that occurred in either 2000 or 2001...they're simply celebrating different millennial phenomena: the first is celebrating the large rolling-over of digits that once per thousand years, the second celebrating the start of a new thousand-year-quantized block of time that started with Year One. Both semantically valid. It's only when you try to attach the year 2000 either to The 21st Century (rather than 20th) or to The 1900s (rather than 2000s) that the meaning is corrupted.

Does that make more sense?

[foofers.livejournal.com]

Same statement, in Venn diagram form. Scientists like Venn diagrams, right?



Can be adapted to other decades/centuries/millennia; same principle applies.

You get a cookie!

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Re: You get a cookie!

[foofers.livejournal.com]

Peanut butter! Best kind!

[zeeth_kyrah]

The spheres in that userpic are performing a trefoil braid.

[araquan.livejournal.com]

I'd been telling you what foofers said for years. Admittedly without the Venn diagram. }:P

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

What were you waiting for, venn?

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

Oh, please. I don't know of anyone who'd call that illiterate.

Innumerate, maybe, but not illiterate.

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

And if you look at cultural decades, "The Sixties" was from 1963-1974 :D