A question for the ages: How do you say 2010?

Facing one of their first "major" decisions of the year, representatives for the University of Washington, the state Democratic Party and the Mariners say they don't know what they're going to do.

Will they call the new year "twenty-ten" or "two-thousand-ten"?

"Oh, Lord, I have no idea," said UW spokesman Bob Roseth when asked how this year's graduating class will be addressed at commencement ceremonies.

"I just don't know," said Dwight Pelz, the highly opinionated chairman of the state Democratic Party. "I'm leaning toward 'twenty-ten.' It's shorter."

Mariners marketing experts have been mulling the decision and are likely to follow whatever trend emerges, according to team spokeswoman Rebecca Hale.

Is the indecisiveness a Seattle thing, another sign of our navel-gazing fondness for process and consensus?

Across the border, Canadians have no qualms about officially proclaiming the Winter Olympics "Vancouver Twenty-ten."

Of course, none of this really matters.

Unless you're Tom Torriglia, president of the National Association of Good Grammar (NAGG).

For Torriglia, it's a no-brainer. He says he never understood why anyone uttered "two-thousand-one" in the first place. No one ever said they were going to party like it's "nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine."

He blames Arthur C. Clarke, his novel "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the 1968 big-screen version of it. "People were conditioned when the movie came out," said Torriglia, 56, a former technical writer in San Francisco who's now working on a book, "The Grammar Police Never Sleep."

Torriglia said he tried to fight the trend at the turn of the last decade. "That was one windmill just too big for me," he admitted. (Torriglia has been crusading against bad grammar for almost 25 years, mainly by nagging advertisers about missing hyphens and misplaced apostrophes.)

But now, he said, he sees a chance to get everybody back on the right path.

"It takes somebody to step up and say, 'This is how it should be.' I decided I'm that guy."

It could be a struggle.

An Australian Broadcasting Company poll in 2000 reportedly found that 60 percent of people favored "two-thousand-ten" over "twenty-ten."

The author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language has predicted that 2010 will be "two thousand ten," but 2011 will be "twenty eleven," according to The Times of London. David Crystal says it's a matter of rhythm, and he thinks the rhythm of "two thousand and ten" is better than "twenty ten."

A UW linguist predicted that personal pronunciations will be divided.

"This is one of the places that our language allows variability and ... we will not converge on one way," said Alicia Beckford Wassink, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Washington

In addition to the debate over what to call the year, there's what to call the decade. The "twenty-tens?" The "tenties?" Or, the top choice in one contest in Australia: the "one-ders."

Back in Seattle, some opinion leaders are apparently letting freedom reign.

"I'd be surprised if anybody is instructed to do it one way or the other," the UW's Roseth said about commencement remarks. "It will probably be a matter of personal preference."

Torriglia said he won't stand for that:

"It's a hot-button issue. I see these are people I need to notify."

Staff reporter Linda Shaw contributed to this story. Bob Young: 206-464-2174 or byoung@seattletimes.com