Some nitpickers insist the new millennium won't start until the year 2001.
Their justification: There was no Year Zero (despite a '50s science fiction film, Panic in the Year Zero).
So a decade, century, or millennium doesn't really start with a "zero" year but a "one" year.
But these well-meaning attempts at precision ignore the fact that calendar-making has always been a less than precise art.
As University of Florida computer-network administrator Thomas Hintz writes, "The calendar is a man-made device. It is an artificial method for defining the passage of time."
Most civilizations have tried to divide time according to the cycles of the sun and moon, to the best of their ability to do so. But the names of these divisions, and their start and end points, are a matter of human creativity.
The Western World runs on the Gregorian Calendar, established by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 and based largely on the suggestions of Naples physician Aloysius Lilius and Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius.
Gregory wanted a more accurate calendar than the Julian system, which had been Europe's standard since the days of ancient Rome. It was Lilius who came up with a more refined system of leap years, to make up for the fact that the solar year takes a little longer than 365 exact days. He also erased eleven days, to make up for past slippage.
The first day of the Gregorian Calendar, October 15, 1582, directly followed October 4, 1582 under the Julian Calendar.
Some European countries (particularly Catholic countries) adopted the Gregorian Calendar right away; others took a while. Great Britain and its colonies didn't adopt it until 1752.
That's why George Washington was born on a February 11, but his birthday was celebrated with a holiday on February 22, until it was morphed into the always-on-a-Monday Presidents' Day.
(Some other nations didn't fully go Gregorian until the 1920s.)
If that's not confusing enough, the Gregorian Calendar was built on top of an established year-numbering system that had been back-dated to start with what religious scholars at the time believed to have been the year Jesus Christ was born.
But even that's become a matter of latter-day disputes. Some historians now believe Jesus could have been born anywhere from five years before to a year after the now-official Year 1.
The next year is called 2000 A.D. (Anno Domini, Latin for "Year of Our Lord") because, about a thousand years prior to the Gregorian Calendar's adoption, a Catholic monk named Dionysius Exiguus was asked by the church to calculate future years' dates for Easter (based on the Jewish passover, which in turn is based on a complicated formula involving full moon and the vernal equinox).
According to calendar scholar Claus Tondering, "At that time it was customary to count years since the reign of emperor Diocletian; but in his calculations Dionysius chose to number the years since the birth of Christ, rather than honour the persecutor Diocletian."
Dionysius chose to base his research on what he figured was the birth year of Jesus Christ. Eventually, the church officially adopted his figures, in the year that was proclaimed to be 523 A.D. (Some non-Christians prefer the alternate designation "C.E.," for "Common Era".)
So, since year-numbering is so arbitrary, go ahead and celebrate the millennium on 1/1/2000. Then next year, you can join the nitpickers and celebrate the millennium all over again.
I haven't responded personally to the picky complainers' emails, but I'll do so collectively here: Hey, it's just numbers! And Jesus was probably born over 2,000 years ago by now anyway!
(More info is at Calendar Zone and at Frequently Asked Questions About Calendars.)
TOMORROW: Everything Is Go, Astroboy!
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