Fancy Naming This Decade 'The Aughties' ?

21st century's first decade is slipping away without leaving its name

By Michael S. Rosenwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 26, 2009

Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, cannot escape the question: What should we call this decade? We have the '80s, the '90s, and . . . the "twenty hundreds"?

With six days remaining until the '10s begin, Sheidlower has bad news for those searching for the answer. "For years and years, people have been seeking a solution," he said. "Well, it never happened. We don't have a name for the decade. Sorry."

Dictionary editors, linguists and even radio DJs say we have entered a semantic black hole in which the English language failed to produce a term for the outgoing decade in the same way it has failed to find a catchy moniker for your former in-laws. (Out-laws never stuck.) The language is stumped. The Zeroes? The Ohs? The Oh-Ohs? Help!

Word search

The Two Thousands? The Aughties?

Surely this is a philological crisis. A language that has a word for "a soft fleecy material made from linen, usually by scraping" -- lint, according to Merriam-Webster's -- cannot possibly exist past Dec. 31, 2009, without a name for the preceding 10 years, right? Wrong. ("The state of being mistaken or incorrect.")

Dennis Baron, a University of Illinois linguist and curator of a Web site that decodes language in the news, said, "People think if we don't have anything to call the decade, that maybe we will forget it, that it will be some kind of orphan decade, that it won't exist. But it's simply not true."

Kenny King, operations manager at WRQX (107.3 FM) -- the radio station that began the decade billing its music as "the best mix of the '80s, '90s and today" and now calls its tunes "the best mix of . . . everything" -- thinks the culture over the past 10 years has grown too complex to be encompassed in a single name. Radio stations that have historically used decade names to give listeners an instant read on what they'll hear have turned away from the practice as listeners started using iTunes to turn their personal music experience into a jumble of decades.

Reeling in the years

The search for a consensus name for the first decade of the millennium is an illustration of a larger problem in the world of numbers. "We have never had a handy way of characterizing the first 10 numbers in a sequence of zero to 100," said Baron. "We have seen the best minds in the world try to find a solution, but the kids aren't dancing to it."

The concept of naming decades is a rather modern one. In the 19th century -- people in the word business tend to take a long view -- nobody really cared a darn. ("Used as a form of asseveration," according to the Oxford English Dictionary.)

But if people insist on searching for the perfect sticky term, Baron has an idea. It involves cash.

"Maybe we could sell the naming rights, like we do with stadiums," he said. "We could give the money to charity. We could get a panel of experts to judge. We could get our friends from Merriam-Webster, from Oxford, from the American Dialect Society. This panel could very easily be assembled."

Or we could just give up, once and for all. [ Extracted from The Washington Post. Read the original article here. ]