I’m getting rather bored with the blame game this week, and thought perhaps we could begin winding down the year here at TMV with the Name Game instead. It’s a topic which I’ve seen crop up in passing on a few web sites and talking head discussions on television, but I don’t believe any consensus has been reached. What’s it all about?
We referred to the period from 1970 through 1979 as “the seventies.” The next two decades were the “eighties” and “nineties” respectively. Easy enough! But what do we call the last ten years? The “oughts?” The “zeros” maybe? And what of the decade which we’ll soon be entering? Somehow “the teens” just doesn’t roll off the tongue very well. Until we get to 2020 and get back into “the twenties” we need to adjust the lexicon a tad.
And what of the specific years we’re passing through. How do you pronounce them? Most people reading this likely spent a fair amount of their lives thus far living in the 1900’s. And we pronounced it the “nineteen hundreds.” Nobody ever said “one thousand nine hundred and eighty four” unless it was preceded by “year of our Lord.” But when the calander ticked over to this decade we started saying “two thousand one.” Fair enough, but when do we get to start saying “twenty?” I get it that “twenty oh eight” sounds kind of awkward, but next week shouldn’t we start saying “twenty ten?”
I don’t think we have any really good rules to go by here. How do you plan on saying the names of the years from here on out?