I worked precisely one day during the holidays, and you won’t believe the argument I started.

I spent Dec. 30 guest hosting the Rush Limbaugh show, certainly an argument-rich environment. But it was not some vast, earth-shaking issue that ignited one of the major poop storms of my recent career.

I was offering some views on the big stories of the year and of the decade. A small blip of e-mails arose in mild protest, with a shared point: The decade would not wrap up until the end of 2010. After a moment of bewilderment, I flashed back to 10 years ago.

As 1999 gave way to 2000, the big story was the turning of the Big Year Odometer. For the first time in a millennium, years would not begin with a one. But accuracy required the reminder that while the dawn of 2000 was the big story, the 21st century would not begin until Jan. 1, 2001. The entire year 2000 was the last year of the 20th century.

People were applying that same logic to the marking of decades. I thought would extinguish this small brushfire with ease.

We do not mark the passage of centuries and decades in the same fashion, I said. We actually count our centuries from the Year One: 16th, 17th, 18th and so on. Remember ordinal numbers from elementary school? Third Reich, Fifth Beatle, 21st century, etc.

We don’t refer to decades that way. We define them by the tens place of the year. The ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, etc. By definition, that means they start Jan. 1 of the year ending in zero and end Dec. 31 of the year ending in nine.

That should do it, I thought.

Not quite. Even if only 1 percent of the Limbaugh audience wasn’t getting my drift, that’s still a mountain of e-mails suggesting that I had lost my mind. “Does that mean the first decade only had nine years?” asked some. “How can a decade begin on a different day than the century?” asked others.

I wondered if I had been speaking Mandarin Chinese. Had I not made clear that while centuries – which we count like segments of yarn in a row leading back to the time of Christ – begin on Jan. 1 of the year ending in “01,” decades do not because we are not counting them like notches on Father Time’s belt?

No one is saying we have completed the 201st decade since the Year One. Obviously, that will not occur until next New Year’s Eve.

But the decades as we all identify them start on Jan. 1 of every year ending in zero. Did Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election really occur in the last year of the ’70s? Was the Bush-Gore election drama of 2000 really the last big story of the ’90s? Please.

The year 2000 is a real troublemaker here, where our methodologies of noting centuries and decades meet in a nasty collision. How can a new decade start before a new century does?

Well, it did. And it always will, as long as we refer to decades and centuries in different ways.

Now what we have to work on is what to call the first two decades of a given century. I grew to like the old-school ring of the “oughts” for the one just ended – it harks back to our grandparents recalling “nineteen-ought-six.”

But as for what to call the decade that did indeed kick off last week, I’ve got nothing. Suggestions are welcome. All I wanted to do with this space was help hose down flare-ups of the argument over whether it had in fact begun.

So happy new year, and happy new decade. Now onto more pressing things – but I will admit that after this, the health care debate suddenly seems like a walk in the park.

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