Names For The Decade
In the English-speaking world, a name for the decade was never universally accepted in the same manner as for decades such as the '90s, the '80s, etc.
Orthographically, the decade can be written as the "2000s" or the "'00s". Some people read "2000s" as "two-thousands", and thus simply refer to the decade as the "two-thousands". Some read it as the "00s" (pronounced "Ohs", "Oh Ohs", "Double Ohs" or "Ooze"), while others referred to it as the "Twenty-ohs". The single years within the decade are usually referred to as starting with an "Oh", such as "Oh-Seven" to refer to the year 2007. On January 1, 2000, the BBC listed the noughties (derived from "nought" a word used for zero in many English-speaking countries), as a potential moniker for the new decade. This has become a common name for the decade in the UK.
Others have advocated the term "the aughts", a term widely used at the beginning of the twentieth century for its first decade. The American Dialect Society holds a lighthearted annual poll for word of the year and related subcategories. For 2009, the winner in the "least likely to succeed" category was "Any name of the decade 2000–2009, such as: Naughties, Aughties, Oughties, etc."
Read more about this topic: 2000s (decade)
Famous quotes containing the words names for the, names and/or decade:
“Oh yes, children often commit murders. And quite clever ones, too. Some murderers, particularly the distinguished ones who are going to make great names for themselves, start amazingly early.... Like mathematicians and musicians. Poets develop later.”
—John Lee Mahin (1902–1984)
“I come to this land to ride my horse,
to try my own guitar, to copy out
their two separate names like sunflowers, to conjure
up my daily bread, to endure,
somehow to endure.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down—not by solving the problem, but by deciding it’s their own damn fault.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)