Well, I just found another whopper of a goof in The New Yorker that should have been caught. In the January 3 issue, I'm reading Jeffrey Toobin's article about Nicholas Marsh, the government prosecutor who committed suicide in the wake of the Ted Stevens prosecution.
Toobin writes that the family of Marsh's mother "settled in Kentucky in the seventeenth century." Well, perhaps, if the family is Native American. There were no white settlements in Kentucky until the 1770s--which, of course, is the eighteenth century.
You know, in school I learned that the English way of counting the centuries is different from the German one:
1401 to 1500 = fifteenth century in German, but fourtheenth century in English.
The 1770s would consequently be in the seventeenth century, just like the article said.
And I remember quite some guided tours through British castles, ruins, manors in which it was referred to the centuries as I learned it as school.
Your comment about it being wrong made me curious and I googled. Found this on wikipedia:
In Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish, centuries are typically not named ordinally, but according to the hundreds part of the year, and consequently centuries start at even multiples of 100. For example, Swedish nittonhundratalet (or 1900-talet), Danish and Norwegian nittenhundredetallet (or 1900-tallet) and Finnish tuhatyhdeksänsataaluku (or 1900-luku) refer unambiguously to the years 1900–1999. The same system is used informally in English. For example, the years 1900–1999 are sometimes referred to as the nineteen hundreds (1900s). This is similar to the English decade names (1980s, meaning the years 1980–1989).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CenturiesThere you go. While Toobin may not be technically correct, he's also not completely wrong, he's just being informally (now we can argue if The New Yorker's standard should require the formally correct counting method
![Wink ;)](http://bettermost.net/forum/Smileys/cowboy/wink.gif)
).