Sir, - Those who claim that this is the final year of the present century display their own wilful ignorance. It is simply extraordinary that there are so many of them. About four-and-a-half-years ago, on this very page, Leslie Lucas and other paragons of rationality demonstrated irrefutably that the new millennium does not begin until the end of the year 2000, but time has gone on and everyone seems determined to see it in a year early.
The confusion seems to spring from two sources. First, the year 2000 is being widely, loosely and erroneously being referred to as "the millennium". This is like referring to a century instead of a centenary. A millennium, as the dictionary informs us, is a period of one-thousand years. 2000 would be more accurately described as a millennial year. Second, the motorised generation has failed to distinguish between ordinal numbers (by which years are designated) and cardinal numbers (which turn up in car odometers). 1 AD was the first year of the present era, 2 AD was the second and so on. There was, as historians will confirm, no year 0. The first thousand years, 1 to 1000 AD, were the first millennium; the second millennium, of the same length, runs from 1001 to 2000 AD; and the third millennium will begin in the first moment of the year 2001.
I have no objection to celebrating the 2,000 year of the Christian era, nor even to marking its arrival with the odd glass of bubbly. The bandwagon, after all, cannot be halted now. But I am disturbed that there is no talk of plans to celebrate that most significant moment of all our lifetimes, the moment when out of the desolate field of noughts at the top of the calendar rises the first slender stalk of a hopeful new millennium - the first of January, 2001. If the Millennium Committee has any balloons and fireworks left by then, please keep them for that New Year's Eve party. Otherwise children of future generations, who will be perfectly capable of reasoning as I have above, will laugh at us all for having missed the Big One.
As the Pooka MacPhellimey so appositely remarks in At Swin-Two-Birds, "Truth is an odd number". - Yours, etc., Robert Nicholson,
Bayview Rise,
Killiney,
Co Dublin.