“The only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once.” — Albert Einstein

I recently saw a sign that said, “When you say that you don’t have the time to do something, it really means that you don’t want to do it.” Well this time I have a lot of time to talk about words involving time, so I’ll begin by talking about a lot of time.

A millennium is a lot of time. Also called a “kiloyear,” it’s a period of 1,000 years, especially when calculated from the traditional date of the birth of Christ. The plural of millennium can be either “millenniums” or “millennia.”

Everyone knows that a century is a period of 100 years, which gives us the term “C-note” for a $100 bill. The Buick Century, a car model manufactured on and off since 1936, was so named because it could hit 100 miles per hour back in the day.

Any 10-year period is, of course, a decade. But things get sticky when we start discussing what’s called a calendrical decade. Most people (64 percent, according to one survey) say that the previous decade ran from Jan. 1, 2010 through Dec. 31, 2019, meaning that the new decade began on the first day of 2020.

Others, including myself, contend that since there are 10 years in a decade and there was no year 0, then the first decade AD ran from the year 1 through the year 10. This means that all new decades since would have begun on the first day of a year ending in 1. So the previous decade ran from Jan. 1, 2011, through Dec. 31, 2020. The same reasoning would hold for the beginnings of centuries and millennia.

We can all agree that we’re currently in the year 2021 A.D., right? Well, not actually. What we are in is the year 2021 or A.D. 2021, but not both. That’s because A.D. already stands for “in the year of our Lord,” so writing “in the year A.D. 2021” is redundant. And if you want to be technically correct, be sure to always put the A.D. before the date.

And things also get sticky when we try to cut the year in half. We all know that “semiannual” means twice a year, but what about something that’s “biannual?” Does it happen twice a year or every two years? Fortunately we have “biennial,” which means “every two years,” to help us out, meaning that “biannual” gets to work only half the year.

A month always consists of 30 or 31 days except, of course, for the one that a lot of people have trouble spelling. That extra day that’s added to February every four years is called a “bissextile day,” and, as you’d probably expect, a February that occurs during a leap year is called a “bissextile month.” (Days that are inserted into the calendar are called “intercalary days.”)

Captain Obvious is here to remind us that a week is made up of seven days and begins on Sunday. And if you don’t believe us, just check your wall calendar, which is printed on paper that’s passed through a calender (a machine that presses paper).

When dealing with hours, be sure to specify whether the time is a.m. or p.m., which the finicky experts will tell us should always be lowercase with periods and no spaces.

A minute is always 60 seconds long unless, that is, you find yourself in New York City, which has officially adopted the 58-second “New York minute.”

They’re in such a hurry there that comedian Johnny Carson once defined a second as “the interval between a Manhattan traffic light turning green and the guy behind you honking.”

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.”

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