For the first week or two of January, people keep writing last year on things. Nobody believes it is still last year; ask them and they’ll give you the right date without a pause. It’s the hand that hasn’t heard. The hand learned the year by writing it a few hundred times, and it unlearns it the same way, one wrong date crossed out at a time, which is why the mistake turns up on forms and the tops of letters and almost never in conversation. Knowing a thing and being used to it are kept in different places, and only one of them gets the news at midnight.