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Ten Gadgets That Defined the Decade
Corpuscavernosa writes "As 2009 winds down and we try to come up with new and clever ways of referring to the early years of this century, there's really only one thing left to do: declare our ten favorite gadgets of the aughts and show them off in chronological order. It's arguable that if this wasn't the decade of gadgets, it was certainly a decade shaped by gadgets — one which saw the birth of a new kind of connectedness. In just ten years time, gadgets have touched almost every aspect of our daily lives, and personal technology has come into its own in a way never before seen. It's a decade that's been marked the ubiquity of the internet, the downfall of the desktop, and the series finale of Friends, but we've boiled it down to the ten devices we've loved the most and worked the hardest over the past ten years. We even had some of our friends in the tech community chime in with their picks on what they thought was the gadget or tech of the decade."
"4) If we use your definition of "decade", then what are we going to call the decade that includes the year 1985 A.D.? "I Love The 80's Including 1990 But Not 1980"?"
We call it 'the 80s', you stupid piece of shit. Note how there's no 'decade' in that phrase, or even the whole fucking sentence. You starting to see how they're DIFFERENT things? 1985 is in the 80s. 1985 is in the 199th decade. 1990 is in the 90s. 1990 is in the 199th decade.
When I say 'this century', people assume I'm talking about the 21st century. When I say 'this millennium', people assume I'm talking about the 3rd millennium. So why is it that all of a sudden, when I say 'this decade', I don't mean the 201st decade?
You're right. We don't HAVE to use year 1 as a starting point. It's arbitrary. It's meaningless. But it's fucking standard, and there's no point in suddenly counting decades starting with year 0 just because people say 'the 80s' more often than they actually refer to 'standard' decades.