http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews
21st century's first decade is slipping away without leaving its name
By Michael S. Rosenwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 26, 2009; C01
Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, cannot escape the question: What should we call this decade? We have the '80s, the '90s, and . . . the "twenty hundreds"?
Sheidlower has faced the query, often posed in panicky tones, at cocktail parties, in letters to the editor, and in phone calls to his word-saturated office. The anxiety began in the mid-'90s, then stretched into the early whatchamacallits -- Aughts? -- and has now reached fever pitch as the decade winds to a close.
With six days remaining until the '10s begin, Sheidlower has bad news for those searching for the answer. "For years and years, people have been seeking a solution," he said. "Well, it never happened. We don't have a name for the decade. Sorry."
Dictionary editors, linguists and even radio DJs say we have entered a semantic black hole in which the English language failed to produce a term for the outgoing decade in the same way it has failed to find a catchy moniker for your former in-laws. (Out-laws never stuck.) The language is stumped. The Zeroes? The Ohs? The Oh-Ohs? Help!
Our mouths seem destined to stumble. On New Year's Eve, in the moments before the ball drops in Times Square, Ryan Seacrest will smile into the cameras and take on the challenge of summing up the years that will be remembered for a terrorist attack on American soil, a near-depression, the election of the nation's first black president and Tiger Woods's contingent of girlfriends. "Let's count down now as the -- what? -- slips away."
Good luck filling that blank, Ryan.
Word search
The Two Thousands? The Aughties?
Surely this is a philological crisis. A language that has a word for "a soft fleecy material made from linen, usually by scraping" -- lint, according to Merriam-Webster's -- cannot possibly exist past Dec. 31, 2009, without a name for the preceding 10 years, right? Wrong. ("The state of being mistaken or incorrect.")
"It's really kind of amusing to me," said Dennis Baron, a University of Illinois linguist and curator of a Web site that decodes language in the news. "People think if we don't have anything to call the decade, that maybe we will forget it, that it will be some kind of orphan decade, that it won't exist. But it's simply not true."
For evidence, see: the romantic partner of an older adult who is not married. The phenomenon exists; there just isn't a good, specific word for it.
"If you are 60 years old, saying 'my girlfriend' sounds stupid," Sheidlower said. " 'Partner' sounds too businesslike or suggests a gay relationship. 'Companion' doesn't sound romantic. The Census Bureau calls it POSSLQ -- persons of opposite sex sharing living quarters. That obviously doesn't work. The fact that there is a need for a word doesn't mean it will arise."
So in the case of the whatchamacallit decade, how did this happen?
Kenny King, operations manager at WRQX (107.3 FM) -- the radio station that began the decade billing its music as "the best mix of the '80s, '90s and today" and now calls its tunes "the best mix of . . . everything" -- thinks the culture over the past 10 years has grown too complex to be encompassed in a single name. Radio stations that have historically used decade names to give listeners an instant read on what they'll hear have turned away from the practice as listeners started using iTunes to turn their personal music experience into a jumble of decades.
"There was a time when the names of decades meant something in radio, but now we download music song by song, album by album," King said. "Categories like that don't matter anymore. I don't think our listeners are going to walk around wringing their hands because we haven't named a decade. You don't want to be stuck in eras."
Reeling in the years
The search for a consensus name for the first decade of the millennium is an illustration of a larger problem in the world of numbers. "We have never had a handy way of characterizing the first 10 numbers in a sequence of zero to 100," said Baron. "We have seen the best minds in the world try to find a solution, but the kids aren't dancing to it."
As in an election that draws a weak turnout, one possible culprit explaining why no name has emerged even after 10 years is the weakness of the candidates.
Here's Sheidlower on the Aughts, which was how some people last century referred to the years between 1900 and 1909: "That would be the most likely one, because it is short. But it hasn't stuck around." On the less formal version of the same name, the Aughties: "Unlikely because it sounds silly." On the Twenty Hundreds: "Too long. And it's not indicative of decades." On the Naughties: "Silly."
"When something works, it gels because people use it," Sheidlower said. "Something arises that people feel to be appropriate, then they use it and then other people use it."
Forgive Sheidlower and Baron if they don't sound exactly bothered about the situation. They say the concept of naming decades is a rather modern one. In the 19th century -- people in the word business tend to take a long view -- nobody really cared a darn. ("Used as a form of asseveration," according to the Oxford English Dictionary.)
But if people insist on searching for the perfect sticky term, Baron has an idea. It involves cash.
"Maybe we could sell the naming rights, like we do with stadiums," he said. "We could give the money to charity. We could get a panel of experts to judge. We could get our friends from Merriam-Webster, from Oxford, from the American Dialect Society. This panel could very easily be assembled."
Or we could just give up, once and for all.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Roy Tucker
