Okay, welcome to 2005!
You likely think that this means that the present decade is half over.
Actually, it doesn’t. ‘Member that whole "fake millennium begins in 2000 but real millennium begins in 2001" thing?
Same deal.
The first half of the current decade is 2001-2005, and the second half is 2006-2010 ("The Year We Make Contact"–better study Jupiter while you can, boys!).
Nevertheless, despite calendrical proprieties, in an important psychological sense, decades start as soon as the number in the tens column changes, so the 1960s were from 1960-1969, not 1961-1970. 1970 just can’t be part of the ’60s. Sorry.
So, by that reckoning, we’re half done.
But . . . what decade are we half done with?
This resurrects a question that plagued a lot of people back around 1999: What were we going to call the next decade? We knew, then, that we were living in the ’90s, but what came next? The Nothings? The Zeroes? What?
Some folks had the foresight–or perhaps we should say, the hindsight–to look back at what happened last time this phenomenon happened, between 1900 and 1909. What did people do with that decade?
Actually, they didn’t do anything. They somehow got through the decade without a standardized name for it and, afterwards, managed to not name it anyway. They might talk about specific years–"Back in ’02, ’04, ’08, or whatever"–but the decade as a whole had no name.
It seems we’re in the middle (literally!) of doing the same thing.
We’ve got half way through the decade with no name for it and seem to be doing just fine. When we get to the tens or teens (of the 21st century), we may start calling it "the previous decade," and when we get to the twenties, we may start speaking of "the first decade of this century," a phrase which would be good through 2100 (the last year of this century, ‘member).
Or maybe not.
Who knows?
I just look forward to the time when we’re all old geezers who can upbraid our whipper-snapper grandchildren by telling them things like:
<creaky old-geezer voice>"Why, I remember back in Aught-Five, just after the second President Bush won re-election and the blue staters, who later seceded from the Union and good riddance to ’em, were so consarned mad because of the moral values issue that the red staters were all hopped up about! Don’t they teach you young ‘uns anything in school these days???"</creaky old geezer voice>
They won’t even know what we’re talking about. (Tee-hee! That’s part of the fun of being old!)
What I want to know is: Did people in 1899 stress about what the next decade would be called?
In the south, it’s the “naughts”. So this year we can say, “Back in naught five…..” That’s what I’ve been doing the past four years, except ’00 of course which was “naught naught”. I think you got the “aught” think because Texans sometimes like to be different form the rest of the South. 😉 Don’t me started on BBQ.
All kidding aside though, may God bless everyone in the New Year!
Would that make this decade the “naughties”?
I think it ought to be ‘double-naught’,as in “double-naught five”. Credit goes to Jethro Bodine who aspired to be a “double-naught” spy
What do you mean “double”???? Shouldn’t that be “duba”?
Personally, I always liked to call it the Naughty Aughties.
The name of the first decade of the 21st Century is the 2000’s. Just like the first decade of the 20th Century was the 1900’s. Most people now think that the terms would refer to the entire century, but they do not – or at least as I read somewhere by some crotchety old guy who complained we were all ignorant now.