Good riddance to the Not-Aughts

In just a few hours, we’ll be ringing in a new year.  Hanging on my kitchen wall will be a new Ansel Adams calendar, replacing the just-completed edition, awaiting events and appointments to be filled in over the next 365 days.

It’s not just the year that’s ending, though.  We’re about to start a new decade as well.  Now, I’m ordinarily of the xxx1-xxx0 school of decade-counting, mostly on account of the no Year Zero rule.  Until this fall, that rule also conveniently placed the most recent World Series victory by the damnYankees in a previous decade ... and in a previous century.  It was fun to say of the Yanks, “oh, they’re just so last-century.  Unfortunately, that snark doesn’t work any more.

But let’s face it—the decade of the 2000s, defined here as 2000-2009, really, really sucked.  No need to enumerate the disasters, both natural and man-made, that befell our little planet over the last ten years.  Even if switching over to a 2000-2009 decade marker results in Yankee bookends on the decade, we need to put this one behind us ASAP.  So, good riddance to the first decade of the 21st century.  Don’t let the calendar hit your butt on the way out.

It was such a sucky decade that we never even named it.  I mean, I’ve lived through the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties, and ... what? The equivalent decade of the 20th century was unambiguously known as the Aughts.  In my childhood, older people would often speak of, say, the Wright Brothers’ first flight occurring in “nineteen-aught-three”.  But nobody ever used, or uses, “aught” in describing the years of the decade we’re finishing. 

It’s also quite unusual to hear anyone use such constructions as “twenty-number”, or even “twenty-oh-number”, for years in this century.  The latter was assuredly the common terminology for the 20th century analogue of the last decade, and the former was the standard for the remainder of the century.  Instead, what we’ve heard over the last ten years is usually in the “two thousand-and-number” format.

Most likely, the rest of the 21st century will follow the conventions of previous centuries.  “Twenty-ten”, “twenty-eleven”, and such roll off the tongue much more naturally than either “"twenty-oh-nine" or “two thousand-and-ten”.

So, as indicated in the title, good riddance to the Not-Aughts.  Happy New Year, all! 

And, coming up in just a couple of days, Peace Tree Farm marks its seventh blogiversary…

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