Debate Begins Over What To Call The Next Decade

The first couple months of the year are behind us and most of us are finally getting the the knack of writing ‘97 on our checks.

And even though it’s more than two years before the odometer on the Gregorian calendar kicks over, a question has come to our attention:

What will we call the decade that begins one second after midnight on Jan. 1, 2000?

The “Aughts” - or “Oughts” - as Americans might say? The “Zeds,” courtesy of the Canadians?

According to the Futurist magazine, which, appropriately thinking ahead, included just that question in its readership poll back in 1993, there is a veritable smorgasbord of possibilities.

The great majority of futurists - 64 percent - voted for “the Two-Thousands.” Individual years would be pronounced “two-thousand-one, two-thousand-two, etc.,” as in “two-thousand-one-potato, two-thousand-two-potato, two-thousand-three-potato.” And so on.

Dry as toast, maybe. But meanwhile, an additional 9 percent of the futurists want to see the decade dubbed the more lively “Twenty-Ohs.”

Five percent went for the “Oh-Ohs.” An equal percentage chose the “Double-Ohs.” Four percent went for the “Zeros.”

According to Simon Collier, chairman of the history department at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, the “Two Thousands” moniker most closely reflects past traditions surrounding turns of the centuries.

“With the years 1900 to 1909, we would always have called those the ‘Ninteen Hundreds,”’ Collier said.

“What’s happened is that in the English language, the ‘Nineteen Hundreds,’ or ‘Eighteen Hundreds,’ have come to mean the ‘whole century’ rather than the centuries’ first decades,” he said. “So that raises a complication.”

Still, Collier suspects the next decade - indeed, the next 100 years - will go down in history as the “Twenty-Hundreds.”

We should also tell you: The Futurist magazine poll provided space for write-in votes. A total of 4 percent of its readership favored the “Aughts,” the “Oughts” and the “Oughties,” as well as the “Naughts” and the “Naughties.”

Thinking even further ahead, the Futurist asked its member-readers what to call the years between 2010 and 2019.

Of course, 69 percent said the “Teens.”