Is English Ready for Y2K?
by Dennis Baron
At
the end of 1998 I predicted that the word of the year for 1999 would be millennium. For the last few years it has seemed obvious that we
were turning our attention to the grand and awesome events one associates with
the coming of a new millennium: whether we were looking for a fresh start, the
end of the world, or just a rollicking good time, the millennium promised to
fulfill our hopes, our fears, our dreams.
But I was wrong. Looking forward to next
year has been replaced in our consciousness by the fear that our computers will
turn on us when the countdown reaches zero. The Y2K bug which prompts this fear
results from the practice of writing the year in computer code using only its
last two digits. Thus programs where 1999 is written 99 may go awry on January
1 when the year becomes 00, which computers may read as 1900, not 2000. One
nightmare scenario has us waking on New Year’s Day cold and in the dark. The
power company’s computers will think it’s 1900 and try to light our homes with
gas and heat them with coal. Even once essential services are restored, we
could find ourselves owing a century’s worth of overdue library fines. And we
shouldn’t expect to get money to pay those fines from our ATM, because that too
will fail.
My Word of the Year for 1999 is Y2K. My bank insists that it is Y2K ready, and some
people are convinced that January 1 will be a big technological yawn, that the
only things that will go wrong are the things that always go wrong. The power
will go out if there’s a New Year’s Day snow storm, like the one last New
Year’s in Chicago. Ten percent of all ATM’s fail on a regular basis no matter
what year it is. And if you do owe the library big time, they’ll settle for ten
cents on the dollar rather than turn your account over to a collection agency.
Nonetheless, preparing for Y2K has been on
everyone’s mind. Even Italy, which doesn’t depend on computers as much as other
countries do, is getting worried. The Italians will halt all trains at 11:30 on
New Year’s Eve. Train travel will resume one hour later, at 12:30 a.m. on Jan.
1. During the hour when the trains are still, attendants will serve champagne
to the passengers to make up for the inconvenience, and to numb them in case
the trains don’t reboot as planned thirty minutes into the year 2000.
Concerns over the potential for massive
systems failure cause me to bring up the more serious question: My bank may be
ready for what comes, but is the English language Y2K ready? What if people wake up on January first
with nothing to say? Will that be the result of the dreaded Y2K glitch, or just
a sign that they are incredibly hung over?
Whatever its state of readiness today,
English may not have been Y1K ready a thousand years ago. The
nineteenth-century writer Thomas DeQuincey characterized Old English -- the form of English which greeted the year 1000 -- as a language of some six to eight hundred words, “most of which express
some idea in close relation to the state of war.”
In order to make English suitable for the
modern world of the 1000’s, it had to have an upgrade, which the French provided by defeating the English at
the Battle of Hastings in 1066, filling all the gaps in our language with
imported French words. Of course
the Angles and the Saxons didn’t necessarily consider French an improvement,
but in the end the English vocabulary grew from its original modest size -- considerably larger than DeQuincey’s 800 word estimate -- to the nearly half a million words recorded in today’s unabridged
dictionaries.
What sort of upgrade will English need to
meet the challenges of the new millennium? Having soaked up French, will it
turn to Chinese? Spanish? Finnish? Computerspeak to fill in the blanks? Or will
English shrink, falling back on itself like a supernova on its way to becoming
a black hole? Considering the effect of Y2K on our current discourse, it’s
conceivable that people a thousand years from now will characterize the English
of 1999 as having an unusually small number of words, “most of which express
some idea in close relation to the state of computer collapse.”
The turn of the millennium is affecting
English, not just with the prominence of Y2K, but with a new set of millennial product names as
well: There’s “The Millennium Countdown Screen Saver,” $19.95, so you can watch
the count down to your computer’s melt down (for best results, order before
midnight). Cheerio’s has introduced the first limited-edition cereal, Millenios, which will be available only until
January. Millenios, dropping one of the n’s no doubt because their spell
checker had fallen victim to the Y2K bug, is “The official cereal of the
millennium” (note the correct spelling here)—and consists of sweetened 0’s and
2’s. The Millenios box suggests that you use it as a time capsule when you
finish the cereal -- or you could recycle it along with the mixed paper.
But my favorite millennial product is Y2K Firewood, “guaranteed to burn on
January 1, 2000.”
Is English ready for Y2K? Are you? The
real pessimists whose web pages scream out reminders that our computers are
doomed think it’s already too late. But if you’re worried about the fate of
English, then I suggest this simple way to prepare for the worst: stop talking
at 11:30 on New Year’s Eve and start drinking champagne. Try talking again an
hour later, on New Year’s Day. If the phones are still working, maybe you could
email to let me know whether you’re still speaking English or you’ve suddenly
upgraded to Italian?
Dennis Baron is professor of English and linguistics at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.