Floridian: The year of confusion

The year of confusion

A centuries-old math mistake may be at the root of all this millennium mayhem. However you add it up, 2000 is not just another year.

By JANET K. KEELER

Need a little perspective on the monster millennium?

Grab a copy of the 2000 edition of the Old Farmer's Almanac and be enlightened. Or perturbed, if you believe that the third millennium begins on Jan. 1, 2001.

Longtime editor Judson Hale Sr. gently reminds readers that the calendar as we know it is just one way to mark time. It's a religious timetable, with one itsy-bitsy error. That mistake may be the cause for the confusion about when the millennium begins, Hale says.

According to the Almanac, it happened like this:

1. A monk named Dionysius Exiguus was asked by Pope John I, who believed in fixing things that weren't broken, to revise the calendar that had been used for 500 years. At that time, the years had been numbered from the founding of Rome in 1280 A.U.C. (ab urbe condita or "from the city's founding").

2. Dionysius, also a student of chronology, calculated that Jesus was born in 754 A.U.C. He junked that year, replacing it with A.D. 1, meaning anno Domini or "the year of the Lord." (Researchers now know that Dionysius was wrong from the beginning; he miscalculated Jesus' birth by at least four years. After all, he didn't have the benefit of an Internet search engine.)

3. It took several centuries for the new system to be accepted in Europe and the Mediterranean region. In A.D. 731, a Northumbrian monk named Bede popularized Dionysius' calendar system in Anglo-Saxon England.

4. Bede contributed the B.C. system for the years before Jesus' birth. Venerable though he was, Bede forgot to put a zero between A.D. 1 and 1 B.C., giving weight to the argument that the first day of the millennium is Jan. 1, 2001.

So, 2000 is kind of a bonus year, neither here nor there. If we did math as Bede did, a child born in 1999 will turn 1 in 2001.

Maybe 2000 is the year you really can say you're still 39.

(One Internet survey shows that most people believe the millennium begins in 2001. That being said, many of those same people are still planning bigger celebrations for the undisputed turn of the century on midnight Dec. 31, 1999.)

Was there this much hype about the millennium in 999? Christians in northwest Europe were aware of both the year 1000 and the passage in the Bible about the devil being loosed after 1,000 years in chains. That worried them, according to The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Denzinger (Little Brown & Company, 1999). But for the flourishing non-Christian cultures in India, Japan and the Mideast, the year 1000 was as unknown as clotted cream.

Editor Hale has no quarrel with the folks who, because of mathematics and history and other things they write to newspaper editors about, believe the new millennium is a whole year and three months away. He does beg to differ with those who don't accept that 2000 -- the look of it, the feel of it, the way it catches on the tongue -- is different and is worthy of a big party.

"For the first time since 1888, the Almanac doesn't have a nine on the cover," Hale says. That still seems odd to Hale, who has had more than a year to get used to those plump, circular numbers. Almanac editors have now been working on the 2001 edition for several months.

Hale, 66, who has been editor for 30 of the 41 years he has been with the Almanac, ventures from his cozy New Hampshire haven each fall on a publicity tour, sharing facts, figures and minutiae from the level-headed grab bag of Americana. Last month, he breezed through Tampa Bay on the heels of Floyd (which the 1999 Almanac predicted) and Harvey (which it didn't).

Hale is a thoughtful man, prone to looking both forward and back, a fellow tailor-made to talk about the changing of the years. He writes in his column, "To Patrons," that when the 1700s turned to the 1800s, the Almanac did little to mark the new century. Then in 1900, editor Horace Ware wrote about the sprawl of civilization in much the same way modern day pundits marvel at the spread of the World Wide Web, Hale notes.

Because of the astounding changes that have taken place in the past 100 years, the mind is boggled to predict what inventions and innovations might occur in the next 100.

"So I thought it would be fun to think about what won't change," Hale says. We can count on the sun rising and setting on Jan. 1, 2100. In fact, Hale tells readers, folks in Boston can watch the sun set that day at 4:23 p.m. And at 9:50 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 25, 2100, the moon will be as big and round as a silver dollar.

In fundamental ways, humans will remain the same, Hale says. The needs for companionship and a sense of purpose will be alive and kicking -- even if our clones are living large in cyberspace.

So what will Hale be doing on New Year's Eve to celebrate this man-made moment? He confesses to a case of Y2K nerves and is trading his traditional holiday in sunny Bermuda for a low-key party in snowy New England.

If he believes what he publishes, a light snow will blow across New England as he salutes the new millennium, or whatever you want to call it.

* * *

What year is it really?

The calendar used around the world is a Christian invention. But there are still other methods of marking time. Depending on whom you ask, next year is really:

7509 (Byzantine)

5761 (Jewish)

2660 (Japanese)

1421 (Islamic)