What Will We Call The Last Decade?

The first decade of the Twenty-First Century is in the bag. We had the pop cultural “-ies” of the 20th Century. (Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, et al.) but is this kind of branding of the decades by the “-ies” over? What are we going to call the last decade? The Aughts? Seriously?

I’ve been thinking about this for more than ten years. It seems just yesterday that it was the last year of The Nineties and we were worrying about Y2K and surfing the web on Lycos or Ask Jeeves. Times have changed. One thing we’ve never really gotten a handle on is what to call this last decade.

On Twitter and Facebook I finally proposed the question. I mean, where else can I get a good feel for what to call this unnamable decade except by crowdsourcing? The results were staggeringly diverse. Some were funny. Some political. Other just clever.

The first response I got on Twitter was from @profnet who asked, “How about The Zilches?” Good one. A contender for the top ten list. @ruthseely chimed in with an interesting term I hadn’t heard yet. “I thought they were called the naughties,” she tweeted. “A term at which I always giggled although I didn't witness much naughtiness.”

“Here is the name for the past decade,” @OneCauseATATime suggested. “Death of Common Sense” Funny, perhaps, depending on which side of the political fence you stand on, but probably not going to make the list by most standards.

Keeping with the political tone, @cpmomcat suggested that the Aughts was actually a good term for the last decade: “The Aughts seems appropriate,” she tweeted. “We aught to have elected Gore or Kerry, we aught to have regulated, etc. I know ought is not spelled with an ‘a’ - but it still works for me.”

A couple of people suggested “the 0’s (ohs not zeros)” which prompted a follow up by @profnet: “I also like the "Uh-Ohs" (play on the Oh-Ohs). :-)”

My Facebook friends were a little more acerbic. A college buddy of mine said: he liked “The ies-less-ies”? A former coworker of mine voted for “The Single Digits.”

No matter what we end up calling this decade my college friend put it best when he said, “Anyone who calls it ‘The Two Thousands’ sounds like a moron!”

Happy New Year!

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