Retorts

I Say! That's Not Cricket!

Like, I suspect, many of your readers, I am becoming increasingly depressed at the general innumeracy of modern society as reflected in confusion over the end of the millennium.

I certainly expect to attend a party or two to celebrate the changing of the first digit of the year after December 31, 1999 -- that's just as interesting as the start of a new, arbitrarily defined millennium -- but it's very disappointing that so many people simply don't seem to be able to count. The year 2000 is the last year of the second thousand years of the Gregorian calendar we use, not the first year of the third thousand.

New Zealand of all places is somewhere that this confusion simply shouldn't arise. After all, don't we play cricket here?

Any cricket aficionado must surely be well aware of the principles involved in counting centuries. No one gets to celebrate a century just because they get 99 runs; that one extra run is very important and remains just as important for the 20th century as for the first. If you start racing down the pitch for your 2,000th run and get run out, you certainly deserve kudos for a great score, but you still didn't complete 20 centuries.

P. Dalton, Christchurch