Dilsexic Pronunciatoin?

* * * * NOTE FROM THE LINGUISTICS MODERATOR * * * *

That is not the proper way to render that number into words, although it has become as popular an error as "dove" for "dived" or "buffalo" for "bison," so that few people bother to correct it any more. We just sigh. The correct rendition is:

One thousand nine hundred seventy-six.

There should never be an "and" after "hundred."

"Twenty oh-nine" is not formed on the same model as "nineteen ninety-nine," so your suggestion is no more logical than the way we usually say it.

If we say "nineteen ninety-nine," then using the same model, 2009 has to be "twenty nine." That would be rather confusing. And if you're going to say "twenty oh-nine" then you'd have to say "nineteen nine-nine" to be consistent, and even then you're following a very colloquial but unscientific convention of pronouncing the numeral 0 as "oh" instead of "zero."

I often go completely colloquial and say "two double-oh nine."

In the last century people said "aught" for "zero." It's a perfectly respectable word that's still in the dictionary, although it was formed by mis-parsing "a naught" into "an aught." We do the opposite today, sometimes saying "a nother" instead of "an other," e.g. "That's a whole nother story." When I was a kid in Arizona the old-timers used to say "back in aught-four, long before this was a state..."

As 2000 approached and we in IT weren't sure that we were going to be able to lure enough old COBOL programmers out of retirement to remediate all the critical legacy systems, we wondered whether the next decade was going to be known as the Uh-Oh's.

I first brought it to the attention of my executives in 1989, and we always simply referred to it as "the year 2000 problem." Largely due to my efforts we had our remediation completed in 1998, including all non-critical systems too, so we never got into the "Y2K" nomenclature.

People in other organizations that hadn't started so early and were prioritizing the non-critical systems which could be allowed to fail began talking about 2K1 and 2K2. As far as I can determine, the human race completed The Largest IT Project In History early in 2K2. I never heard any credible accounts of critical systems failing in 2000, but geeze the non-critical failures were rampant:

• My power company couldn't send out bills until June, and then they were off by a factor of four (inflated, naturally). Fortunately they had remediated the software that controls the power plants.
• My bank never got a single mortgage statement correct in 2000--which by the way apparently had thirteen months. Fortunately the code in their ATMs was remediated.
• I bought two cases of diet soda with expired aspartame and discovered that the expiration dates printed on the cartons were garbled. Fortunately those companies had remediated the software that labels insulin and other medications.

 

Unfortunately that's what a lot of people think. They just chalked up all those failures of unremediated non-critical systems to "typical computer problems." They didn't understand that they were caused by Y2K-incompatibility.

It's really annoying. Millions of us spent at least an entire year of our life and in many cases more, desperately working on Y2K. First we had to identify the systems that were critical and simply had to be made ready. Then we had to wade through code that was 10 to 25 years old and had been "maintained" by seven different people with different styles of problem solving. (Unlike elevators and cars, which get better when you maintain them, computer code gets worse until ultimately you can't touch it or it will stop working completely.) Then we had to test it all on an accelerated schedule that we would never tolerate on a normal project. Then we had to spend New Year's Eve in the office, or at least sitting by the phone, sober and rested and prepared for a marathon debugging session with lots of angry important people looking over our shoulders and yelling about down-time whose cost was measured in hundreds of dollars per second.

And (AFAIK) we pulled it off. No one I know ever got word of a red-blanket system that was not completely healed by 12:00am on January 1. It was something to be proud of: the largest IT project ever, and one of the largest engineering projects ever launched, and it was a rousing success.

And we can't even put it on our resumes because everybody thinks it was a hoax.

And all because for thirty years managers kept putting the problem off so somebody else would have to take care of it. Capers Jones said they should all be prosecuted for professional malpractice.

As the Linguistics Moderator, I don't get it either. But at least he has a good sense of humor and misspelled "dyslexic."

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