Wearing a mohawk would be more analogous to using a unique and unusual font, which although may initially “throw someone off”, is at least easily put aside once the person starts speaking.
The year thing is more analogous to a very weird pronunciation of a word by the speaker, everything starts off regular then they say the word and everyone’s distracted for a moment while they try to process what the person meant, they make a best guess and go back listening to the speaker with their undivided attention again.
Then the speaker does the weird pronunciation again, and again the listener loses their train of thought, (maybe thinking, there it is again, it really seems like they are trying to say xxx), and again the listener might have missed a little of what the speaker was saying.
After a few times of this the listener finally feels confident in what the speaker is trying to communicate and it’s no longer significantly distracting.
My takeaway from listening to such a speaker would always be prefixed with the fact they tried to push a viewpoint (that something should be pronounced differently) which is completely tangential to the topic they were speaking about, which is to say, they seem to care more about expressing this pronunciation agenda such that they’re willing to sabotage the expression and communication of their primary topic.
For what its worth, my reading of the text you're criticizing was not at all characterized by the level of distraction you describe; and this coming from somebody who is otherwise so distracted by typos that I will skip a comment (or blog post) that has more than a couple.
Perhaps a level of familiarity with the convention plays a role, as I have chanced upon the Long Now Foundation and some of its writings. Despite, that was a long time ago. There are competing conventions such as writing the year 2000 as 102000 so as to reflect a common estimate of the origin of our species, which I encountered via kurzgesagt.
I support the author’s rebuttal that if the slightly unusual year number prevents you from taking in the content and its points, you might just not be a member of the intended audience.
> you might just not be a member of the intended audience
There’s no relationship between people who would appreciate the history the author was trying to communicate, and people who aren’t distracted by prefixing a pointless zero before the date.
Unless you really meant that as a snide comment calling GP an idiot.
Either way, maybe the zero prefixing thing is just stupid and not the hill to die on you seem to think it is.
The year thing is more analogous to a very weird pronunciation of a word by the speaker, everything starts off regular then they say the word and everyone’s distracted for a moment while they try to process what the person meant, they make a best guess and go back listening to the speaker with their undivided attention again.
Then the speaker does the weird pronunciation again, and again the listener loses their train of thought, (maybe thinking, there it is again, it really seems like they are trying to say xxx), and again the listener might have missed a little of what the speaker was saying.
After a few times of this the listener finally feels confident in what the speaker is trying to communicate and it’s no longer significantly distracting.
My takeaway from listening to such a speaker would always be prefixed with the fact they tried to push a viewpoint (that something should be pronounced differently) which is completely tangential to the topic they were speaking about, which is to say, they seem to care more about expressing this pronunciation agenda such that they’re willing to sabotage the expression and communication of their primary topic.