it seems that you assume people will not realize that the dates will be called according to pre-existing conventions as you suspect.
I'm having a hard time parsing that, but see if this helps:
The poll question was pretty awkwardly worded, because I was trying to come up with a concise way to ask it that was different from the way I was asking it in the post, so as not to be monotonous. The question was if/when you'll say "twenty _____" rather than "two thousand _____". What sparked it was the thought that eventually we're pretty much going to have to switch over to "twenty _____", and wondering when precisely we as a society will make that transition.
As for calling this year twenty-oh-nine and this century the twenty-hundreds, that is less likely for our generation (I'm already used enough to saying twenty for 2010 and on that I probably won't have a problem doing it for all these years, at least if that's what we end up doing; and I would like to call it the twenty-hundreds rather than the two thousands just for clarity's sake), but I have a feeling that our kids, who will probably be growing up in the 20s and 30s, will get used to always saying "twenty _____", and so will likely retroactively refer to this decade that way too, speaking of the past in the context they grew up in, similar to the way we who grew up in the 80s and 90s call 1906 "nineteen-oh-six" rather than "nineteen hundred six", whereas someone who was alive to see the switch to 1900 would be more likely to go with the latter. The additional zero will certainly be a complicating factor, but I think you're overestimating its effect.
Ultimately, we can't predict it. Comparisons to the way we talk about the 1000s aren't totally valid. Someone who grew up in the 2030s will immediately think of the number 2000 as being the year 30 years before 2030, when we look at the number 1000, it's so long ago that we see it as a number primarily, and a year secondarily, so by the time we're thinking about it as a year, we've already parsed it as being a thousand. Or at least that's the way I think my brain works.
And yes, it's pretty much a pointless waste of time, but this is an internet forum. If this does have a point, ultimately it's about exploring the different ways we think about things. You're being a bit closed-minded about it, really. Despite your claim that "the naming convention regarding other decades kicks in next year," there have already been replies saying that they're not following that until later into the decade, the overwhelming majority of commercials I've seen that talk about financing with no interest until 2010 are still pronouncing it in Old Style, and my IRL friends seem to be pretty evenly split on it. There's not as much of a consensus as you seem to think, or at least it's not evident yet. And your complaint that "'Twenty oh nine' would be an unwieldy and ridiculous thing to call this year" sounds dangerously close to get-off-my-lawn talk. The next generation will call it whatever they want to call it, and if we don't like it, that makes it, if anything, more likely to happen.
Poll
