It will be fun to look back on the decade - a year from now

Quick. Count to 10.

OK, now think back. When you were counting, what was the first number you used? What was the last?

That's right. You began with "œ1" and you ended with "œ10." That is something that we know before we begin first grade.

I think about this every 10 years. I'm thinking about it now. That's because I happily anticipate looking back on the events and trends of the first decade of the new millennium. Which exercise I will undertake - a year from now.

Yet inexplicably it happens every decade: the popular culture mavens do all their retrospective pieces a year early. You're seeing it all over the place now.

We're on the cusp of it becoming 2010. But the significance of that year is, appropriately, zero.

You may have become familiar with this when you were little and were counting pennies. You did not have a dollar, you may have noticed, until you had 100 pennies. You did not have a dollar when you had 99 pennies. The second dollar did not begin until penny 101.

If you are counting pennies to make a dime, nine will not do. You need 10 of them.

Yet for some reason we think there is a special significance to the jump from the ninth to the 10th year. It's weird.

It's not as bad as it was, of course, 10 years ago, when people whose educations did not seem to extend to arithmetic got mesmerized by all those zeros in the year 2000. The new millennium began on Jan. 1, 2001. This fact - and it is unquestionably a fact - went largely unremarked upon.

There was a bit of an excuse a decade ago, of course, something called "Y2K." The concern was that on a number of older computer systems the year was signified by only two digits, with the leading "19" assumed. So, it was thought, at 12:00:01 a.m. on January 1, 2000, the computers would think it was suddenly 1900, the lights would all go out, airplanes would fall from the sky, and people would react to the blackouts and plane crashes by looting and pillaging, even though outside of New York City this is not the usual reaction to those kinds of events.

Some people stocked up on food because they thought - no idea why - none would be available. Some even built shelters, though it was never really specified when it would be safe to come out into the sunshine once more. It could be there are still some people hiding in them.

Of course, Y2K came and went, and the lights stayed on and the planes stayed in the skies and civilization did not end, at least not with Y2K as the cause.

But the phenomenon of assuming that a new decade begins with the year ending in zero, and a new century with the year ending in two zeros, had been around long before the year 2000. It is hard to figure out why.

We do, after all, begin counting things - and years are things - not with zero but with one. There was no year 0.

(Of course, no one awakened 2010 years ago this Friday and said, "Wow! It's Jan. 1, 1!" Nor did celebrations the night before include recognition that it was the last day of 1 B.C.; the counting of years in modern nomenclature began years later, with the establishment of the Gregorian calendar in 525 A.D. That is the calendar under which we live.)

For us to consider 2009 the end of the decade, we would have to have had a year 0. But this means the first century, too, would have to have been the zeroth century. And the first millennium the zeroth millennium. It doesn't work that way. It can't work that way, unless you want to be at the end of the zeroth decade of the zeroth century of the second millennium.

It is really a fairly simple proposition. Which makes one wonder why it is gotten so consistently - nearly universally, in fact - wrong. Maybe it's a variation of Gresham's Law, and the wrong drives out the right. Who knows. But it's gotten to where publications pretty much have to embrace the error in self defense.

Yet it irritates me when we could get it right and choose to get it wrong instead.

Then again, every year is the beginning of a decade. You could have best and worst lists of the last 10 years anytime you wanted. Probably most of us do that kind of thing to some extent, personally, in that most of us were not born on Jan. 1 of a year ending in 01.

Perhaps it's easier to ignore the whole thing, to let the calendar follow whatever standards we feel like having. This could catch on.

I can even imagine the inspirational poster: "Today is the first day of the rest of the decade."

Editor's note: Dennis E. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. His column appears on Mondays. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.