What Do You Call It? Reflections on a hard-to-name decade

clipped from www.newyorker.com ten years ago, no consensus could be reached in this country on what to call the decade upon which we were about to embark. The ohs? The double-ohs? The zeros? The zips? The nadas? The naughties? As we near the end, however, we still don’t have a good collective name for the first decade of the twenty-first century—at least, not one beyond “the first decade of the twenty-first century,” which is gratifyingly lacking in cuteness Arguably, a grudging agreement has been reached on calling the decade “the aughts,” but that unfortunate term is rooted in a linguistic error. The use of “aught” to mean “nothing,” “zero,” or “cipher” is a nineteenth-century corruption of the word “naught,” which actually does mean nothing, and which, as in the phrase “all for naught,” is still in current usage. To call the decade “the aughts” is a compromise that pleases no one But perhaps that’s appropriate, since this turned out to be the decade in which there were no good answers.