CAN WE PLEASE LEARN TO SAY IT CORRECTLY?

When are we going to stop saying "two thousand AND ten" for the current year?

Everyone does it, including news casters -- even those on the national news -- who should know better.  We put the word "and" after the decimal designation on all figures over two digits these days.  Hence, 193 become one hundred and ninety three.  The figure 27 is spoken as twenty seven, but I half expect any day to hear someone say, "twenty and seven." 

When you add the digit four in the hundreds position, i.e., 427, many of us will say "four hundred and twenty seven." That is wrong!

A three-digit figure such as 427 is correctly read as "four hundred twenty-seven."  The figure 8,427 is correctly read as "eight thousand four hundred twenty-seven."  No "and."

Any "and" in reading a figure comes when there is a decimal point.  If your luncheon bill is $26.78, the cashier should say,  "Your bill is twenty-six dollars AND seventy-eight cents."  If you bought a car for $23,800.52 (tax and fees included), you would say, "My new car cost me twenty-three thousand eight hundred dollars and fifty-two cents."  If you say, "My car cast me twenty-three thousand and eight hundred dollars and fifty-two cents," you are displaying your ignorance.

I do not remember educated adults using "and" in our dates or other large numbers before the year 2,000.  Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December seventh, nineteen forty-one, not December seventh, nineteen hundred and forty-one.  For some reason after the year 2,000 we started adding the word "and" to large numbers.  Thus, the year 2001 became two thousand and one -- and we were off on the wrong track, never to return to speaking correctly, I fear.

In 1960 we spoke of that year as nineteen sixty, not nineteen and sixty.  Why do we feel obligated to speak of this current year as two thousand and ten?

Isn't it time to try and remember a little of what our math teacher in school taught us and start talking about numbers larger than two digits like we had at least a fourth-grade education?