YEAR and time types

[hsv]

A director s term ends in a given year, but at no given time of year; depends on the
yearly meeting.

I thought I would try YEAR to record it--but, in spite of
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/year.html , simply assigning NOW() to such a type
does not work. There is also no implicit conversion to DATE. All in all, it behaves as a
small integer, not a time type. For my end it is much less good than 'year-00-00',
something already slightly obscure.