Decade dilemma

It usually takes the first couple of weeks into the New year for us to ease into it.Many of us keep writing the previous year in place of the new one on cheques and letters.

This year kicks off a new decade and with it brings an interesting task of naming the decade,quite similar to the conundrum in the year 2001. We had become quite accustomed to decades being seventies, eighties and nineties and so the first decade of the 21^st century had people scurrying for a term for the decade.

Several terms were discussed, but the now noughties is the acceptable term, which also had its share of protests because it sounded more like naughty and is a more British term than being international.

That issue was sorted as late as 2007,as the print and electronic media pushed noughties/oughties a lot.However,we have to name this one.There are competitions being held to unearth a new,suitable,trendy,catchy easy to say term for this particular decade.So what do you call this decade?

But as a student fed up with organic chemistry would argue, why bother with nomenclature?Similarly why is so important to name this decade?

Well,just for convenience, and secondly because of it peculiar characteristics ,it would be fun and challenging. Traditionally, it is the hippier trendier word that takes precedence. For instance we say twenty ten not two thousand and ten for 2010.

Some have suggested teenies, but the teen years don’t start until 2013,so 2011 and 2012 are unaccounted for. Deccies..sounds okay without having any particular logic behind it.

Thinking a little out of box, how about D0,D1,D2....

Dzeros, D-ones .It is alpha numeric like most of our passwords.But then again,it doesn’t fit into the ‘ties’ criterion, although it does have a nice ring to it and is two syllable. If we consider roman numerals and then consider, it can be decade X or even decXies.

Tennies sound more like tennis. People in the 1920’s used to say ‘back in the tens’,so just tens can also be an option. Twenty-tens is longer,so is twenty-twenties,and could just catch on in a few years.In Australia, the suggestion ‘one-ders’ won a competition!

I think this decade will remain an exception of how it would be called.It may be refered as something not remotely to do with numbers at all.Why not stickies? Because there is a one (stick)in every year.

Don’t laugh,no idea is a bad one while brainstorming.

I don’t know yet ..maybe we can name it after an event,however the 1910’s is not called World War decade either.But we can’t peep into the future and know what would happen. However we have a decade to come up with something, so don’t worry about it too much, but do think about it at least once.

Welcome to the new decade!