(A big thanks to my fellow babblers for your great posts and feedback on my original suggestion. You've helped me to revisit the problem of a new decade name, and given me insights towards a revised suggestion. Again, thanks!)The "Ohties"
We're four years into this new decade, and we still don't have a commonly used name for it. That's no good.
In the previous century, with the massive increase in popular media and shared cultural consciousness (no matter how lofty your intellectual tastes, you know exactly what is meant by the term "voted off the island" even if you never lowered yourself to watch the associated reality tv show), we developed the habit of measuring and defining our pop cultural cycles by decade. So the phrase "the fifties" instantly evokes unique images and sounds, clothing styles and car designs, and the same can be said for most of the decades of the twentieth century. The broadest unit of popular cultural time is the decade. So every decade needs a name.
But a name for the first decade of the twenty-first century continues to elude us, because we are under the spell of a quirky naming paradigm that has established a pattern fitting only the latter eight decades of any given century, courtesy of the suffix "ties." So you have your twenties, your thirties, your forties, your fifties, your sixties (if you remember them), your seventies, your eighties and your nineties. But when you rollover the century and start fresh, what have you got? The "aughties?"...the "oh's?"...the "naughties" (as a number of the more salacious would-be decade namers have suggested)? Can you picture any one of these used for a "Greatest Hits Of The (decade)" CD?
Me neither. None of them seem right.
In fact, nothing will seem right until we pick a name and all start using it, because the interval 0-9 doesn't have a neat, one-word dictionary term like 70-79 does, and nothing was firmly established as common usage in the previous century, perhaps because the decade as a unit of cultural time wasn't all that meaningful a hundred years ago. So we need a name that follows the established pattern--that ends in "ties"--and that sounds like it's a natural result of decade numbering.
Here's my suggestion for a new name for the first decade of a century: the "ohties."
Sure, it's not a real word (for now), and it sounds a little funny (though not nearly as funny as naughties), but it fits the two criteria I've cited. And if you need to justify the relevance of "ohties," just note the way most people refer to the years of this decade: "oh-one," "oh-two," "oh-three"...you get the picture.
I think if you take a look at this new decade name placed "in order" with its siblings, you'll see how it fits (I've also taken the liberty here of re-naming the next decade so as to maintain a uniform decadal nomenclature):
Ohties
Tenties
Twenties
Thirties
Forties
Fifties
Sixties
Seventies
Eighties
Nineties
...and back to The Ohties.
Hey: I'm not saying it's perfect. But if four years of this decade have already gone by and the novelists, poets, journalists and other masters of the word who capture and define our language haven't yet come up with a name that's stuck for the first decade of a new century, then why not give "ohties" a chance? By the time you've read to here, you'll probably find that "ohties" sounds almost right.
Picture one day seeing this on the shelves of your local music store: The "Greatest Hits Of The Ohties." See? Ohties. Now that’s something you can call a decade.
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posted 19 November 2003 02:00 AM
