What's in a name?

So! It’s New Year after all! Happy 2010 guys!!! The time when we look back, relive good memories, learn from the bad ones and move on to shinier, happier days! But I do have this curious thought in my head: it is a problem with ordinal numbers, a shortcoming of language that challenges us all. Just what exactly do we call this decade? It was so much simpler back in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. The decade spanning 2000-2009 came up, people suggested stuff like “the oh’s”, “the naughties” (my personal favorite!), and “the ought’s” (this one was the more accepted idea). But no one really stuck to one term. So, exactly what do we call this decade? Here are some ideas:

THE TENS: when we say 10’s…to a lot people it means the decade of the 1910’s. we could still stick to it, but then a lot of significant stuff happened in the 1910’s (the only thing I remember about that decade is the titanic sinking!) and people don’t wanna confuse the two.

THE TEENS: I wouldn’t say it’s a bad name. But imagine what we’d call the stars or movies (or something along that line) of this decade then? “Movies from the teens”? The term just seems awkward to me.

THE TWENTY TENS: I really like this idea and then someone asked me if that meant that we currently live in the year twenty-o-ten. That just confused me and I’m back on square one. But I still really like the idea.

THE TWEENS: hahaha…sounds really cute to me though.

THE 2nd MILLENNIUM TEENS: I think it's really long for a name and I’m sure people will eventually shorten it to teens again.

THE TWENTEENS: not bad again, but if we were to follow the same trend…what we would call the next decade? The twent-twenties? NoT!

So with all these ideas, I like the twenty tens the best. I'm sure people will come up with a lot more creative ones if they're really asked to think. The previous decade pretty much stayed a nameless one even with some nice ideas. You may ask, ‘so, what’s in a name?’ But given all that has emerged in the past decade, the failure to invent a satisfactory name seems to be a reflection of our sense that the so-called “oughts” were not all that they ought to have been or perhaps much less than they had promised to be. With so much that happened in the past decade, and most of it unforgettable, it just seems to have gone by unnamed, like no one wants to own it. So is this decade set to face the same fate of being an orphaned era? Or will it be named something cool, a name worthy of all that it’s set to bring? Now that, only time will tell.