What Year is Coming Up?

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Do you know what year is coming up?
If you said, "Two thousand eight," you're dead wrong!
For any number containing the word "thousand" is a quantity, not a year. If you have "one thousand nine hundred seventy-five" pennies, you have almost twenty dollars. But "one thousand nine hundred seventy-five"
is not a year; it is an amount or quantity. The year is read correctly "nineteen seventy-five."
The same is consistently true of "2008." If you have "two thousand eight" cars on a lot, this tells how many cars that you have; it says nothing about the make or year in which the cars were produced. The only correct or literate way to read the date or year 2008 is "twenty-oh-eight."
Play this game with friends. It is astonishing just how many will get it wrong! Ask, "What year is the year just coming up?" An amazing number of people will illiterately answer, "Two thousand eight."
But the only correct answer, known to all literate people, is "twenty-oh-eight."
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