A few years ago, I started a sentence in my class with "When I was born". A student instantly chimed in and said "What in the 19's?" And I thought in my head, of course you idiot, everybody is born in the 19's. It still haunts me.

I mean, tbf that was admittedly last millennium.

My dad told me recently, when he started practicing medicine the old people with heart failures he was treating were often born in the late 1800s, but now those are all dead, and the people he's treating are more likely to have a birth years that are around 1940-1950. Which is also starting to become uncomfortably close to his own, 1960.

I'm Gen-X, 51, and this doesn't sting too much...so like whatever. I do feel for Millenials and the elder Gen-Z though.

Imagine being Gen-Z out to buy some beer, you pull out your ID, the cashier barely glances at it and runs your credit card. You smugly say, "I guess you don't really check ID since you didn't really look at the date." The cashier responds, "I did. I saw the nineteen." Ooooff.

One day, there will only be a handful of people from the 19 hundreds left

I’m going to start saying that when asked about my birth year. “The late 1900s”

This is just intentionally phrased poorly to create a rise out of people. It's like referring to water as "dihydrogen monoxide".

To use a quote from the later part of the 1900s:

Time keeps on slippin' into the future.

I mean, sure, fair, it IS late 1900's, but...

Reading that just broke my hip.

It seems awkward to me to refer to the previous century that way until you're at least halfway through the next century. Even then, that's pushing it. Basically I think that way of referring to an era implies you're over, or at least fairly close to, 100 years away from it.

I regularly say "from the 20th century" when I want to emphasize the age, the irrelevance, of my lack of knowledge of something.

I don't know crap about cars, so sometimes, someone would ask me about an old one or something and I'd say "not sure, mid-20th century I think".

It's a funny way to talk about it and it almost masks the fact I just tried to get away with a 25-year window.

Although in a more rude manner I'll also say I don't care about some 20th century movie or something.

From the last millennium

I feel old and I wasn't even born on the 1900s

I suddenly feel like the crypt keeper

It does depend what we're talking about. The geology of Himalaya or computer technology? One of these things didn't change much in the last forty years.

Isn't this an actual thing? Pretty sure I was told by some instructor not to use references older than a decade or two. Unless the subject is very elementary older sources are more likely to be obsolete

TTT... no matter how much we don't like to admit it.

Someone left me a reply just yesterday with that date format. At first I was going to reply back that they must have made a typo, but then realized they weren't wrong. Ouch.

I just pulled my back and broke my hips reading this, it made me feel so old 👴🏻