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

It still feels wrong to me, to see it written out, but spoken its different.

I feel like it works to go with say, the 1600's, which I read naturally as the 16 hundreds. But when I see 1900 I read that as the nineteen naughts, (aughts?) because so often when people are referring to periods in the 19 hundreds, its down to the decade because so much changed between each one. Or maybe I just felt that way because I'm so old now.

Maybe in another 25 years, it'll be far enough away that 1900's becomes 19 hundreds in my head.