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Millennium (SemiReal)A Popular Word At The End Of The Twentieth Century
Date: 1999/10/20 Agree? Disagree? : Have Your Say Buy Books About This Topic At: Amazon UK Amazon US Send This Article To A Friend: Email It Use Telepathy
"Millennium" is a word that came into fashion in the late part of the twentieth century (AD). It was used as a commercial adjective to express that a product had special qualities, although no one was quite sure what these actually were [1]. For instance, the United Kingdom government designated a whole range of millenium products to show how awesomely great British products were. These products were displayed in the Millennium Dome, London, UK, Earth, and included wellington boots for cows, which prevent hoof rot, or at least let the cows jump around in puddles without getting their socks wet. The word "millennium" was used so much that it became annoying. Eventually you couldn't even express the tastiness of food without making a millennium statement [2]! In any case, the word had something to do with the flipping of some digits on the Christian calendar: going from 1999 to 2000 was called going to "the new Millennium!" There were of course opposing factions [3] who argued that the definition is that the millennium changes when going from number 2000 to 2001, but that is of course by no means as spectacular as all four digits changing, so only few people payed them any attention. It could also be argued that the Christian calendar wasn't correct anyway, because good old J.C. wasn't born at the calendar's definition of his birth day [4]. In addition, there are many other calendars around as well! Nobody cared about that, because who would want to give up the chance to party bigtime?!! Expectations were high for this party, as it had to surpass all parties given in the previous 1000 years. This was of course close to impossible, and further troubled by another twentieth-century invention: the Millennium Bug. No, that wasn't an insect designed to take over the world; it was a software bug. Apparently most programmers were followers of a cult that believed that civilization would end before the year 2000 (by which time insects would indeed take over the world). This implied that they could save themselves the trouble of using four (instead of two) digits in their program variables dealing with dates (i.e. 99 instead of 1999). The cult lost increasing numbers of its following in the 1990s, by which time people realized that this prophecy was a self-fulfilling one: nuclear reactors would explode when they lost track of time, etc., etc.. Many people were employed to correct the error, resulting in many "millennium-proof" products [5]. This of course meant that they could withstand the change of century, but with the rapid development of computers in that time, this wasn't really true for all of them. Some software was millennium-proofed by installing patches that set the dates back 20-30 years, giving them equal years more life. Don't people ever learn?! The second coming of Christ was also expected at the "change of the millennium", as he had failed to turn up at the previous millennium-party [6]. Many people saw the commercial opportunities in this and went to great lengths to produce a baby by the first of January 2000. They failed to take heed of the controversy in the religious world about whether Jesus would return as a baby, be born into maturity (Tummy-streching Ouch!) or ascend from the heavens in one piece (obviously having hitched a hike from an alien space-ship). The word was further used to indicated that this was the last time in the second millennium of the Christian calendar that you could, for example, watch such and such television show, drink this, eat that, and actually experience anything. Finally, after either one [7] of the following: ...this word rapidly became obsolete.
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