Caveat temporalis: Greetings from the Gregorians

By Porter Anderson
CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- On this New Year weekend, there are far too many parties for us to poop with a technicality. So we're not worried about -- nor interested in -- pouring anything cold but champagne on your celebrations. Journalists that we are, however, we hope you'll allow us to put in a brief word for the purists among us, the ones who won't be popping their corks for another year.

Let us start by throwing in the towel.

Celebrations • The celebrations guide • Your Millennium Pictures • Panorama: New Year's in New York • 2000 chat calendar • Gallery: Enter another world Stories • Apostles of the Apocalypse: Are we ready for the end? • The great millennium misunderstanding Y2K • Preparation pays off • Your Y2K forum The Future • A virtual peek into what's to come The Past • A thousand years of history

Marketing mavens long ago decided that a change of all four digits, from 1999 to 2000, is much too lucrative to pass up. And most commercial and promotional operations -- including our CNN family of Time Warner networks and other major news organizations -- have decided to talk about the "new millennium" as if it's starting now. It's not. And you should know that for many of us on the editorial side, this has created a rare but real schism between factual presentation of the news and populist, company-endorsed terminology.

Here's the background.

In the year we know as 1582, Pope Gregory XIII proclaimed the adoption of what's called the Gregorian calendar. It was an improvement on the Julian calendar, which was losing as much as a day each century.

Now, Gregory XIII was a challenging guy. He was so cheered by the 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of French Protestants in Paris that he led a Te deum in Rome to celebrate the moment. And he was an avid fan of censorship: As part of his "Counter-Reformation," he had his cardinals draft the Index Liborum Prohibitorum, the "List of Forbidden Books." In his day, we members of the press may have suffered much worse than premature declarations of big dates.

But Gregory XIII did get most of us onto one hell of a calendar. Today, any country in which 1999 is the outgoing year follows the Gregorian calendar. And if we're smart enough to knock out leap year each time we hit a year divisible by 4,000, that thing will last us for 20,000 years. Make a note of that for 2,000 years from now.

There's just one problem. The Gregorian calendar, like the calendar of Dionysius Exiguus on which it's based, has no year 0. In putting the thing together, Gregory had the assistance of a Neapolitan astronomer named Luigi Lilio Ghiraldi and a German Jesuit and mathematician named Christopher Clavius. These scholars were positing Jesus' birth as their calendar's starting moment. And they seem to have overlooked the fact that when a child is born, that kid has to grow for a year before she hits her first birthday. For whatever reason, maybe poor parenting skills, they started their solar-dating calendar with anno Domini uno, year 1.

This means the 21st century and the 3rd millennium won't start until January 1, 2001.

So what starts this weekend?

The last year of the 20th century.

And the last year of the 2nd millennium.

As impatient as we moderns are, this simply is neither the start of the 21st century nor of the 3rd millennium. Not yet.

It's amusing to note that the Gregorians were eager to get going, too: They were so intent on rolling out their plan that in 1582 they officially jumped from October 4 to October 15 overnight, to get dates synchronized to what they called their "new style calendar." A temporal stunt like that today could make the Y2K computer bug look like your best friend.

May that glitch be nowhere near your software as we enter this new year. And not for one Gregorian moment would even the toughest stickler among us wish you anything but peace, prosperity, health and happiness in the 12 months we're beginning. But it's at the end of those months that we recommend you start your vigil for that "new millennium."

And take heart: For once, we'll have Madison Avenue -- and yes, even our own networks' PR people -- by the short hairs. They've shot their wad. They've done it all this year. They went off the calendar, defied the numbers and cried "Wolf!" Come Saturday, by their own relentlessly advertised calculations, it's over, kaput, we're there, say goodnight, Gracie.

So it's our turn next year.

The real year.

We'll bring you news of the real thing.

Thanks to the ad people's irrational exuberance today, we'll have the opportunity just a year from now to stand in comparative and rightful and holy and thoughtful quiet -- blessed advertising silence. And we'll see something few humans get to witness: an epochal change, the eerie, mind-bracing mystery of what our calendar system charts to be a bona fide new era, powering down onto us with the inexorable force of time's restless beauty.

To paraphrase the great, final line from Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey": When we reach the true new millennium next year, we may not know what we'll do next -- but we will think of something.

See you then.