If I had really wanted to be in the vanguard of people noting that the Current Decade Now Ending has no consensus official name – not "no nickname" like the "Gay Nineties" or the "Roaring Twenties" or the "Me Decade" but no spoken-English name like the "Nineties" or "Twenties" or the "Seventies" (and no, the written-English-only "'00s" really doesn't count) – I would not have waited until the last day of the decade to publish this diary, just as if I were really all that concerned about avoiding playful run-on sentences I would not have just written this very sentence’s hundredth word. And yet, respectively, I didn't and so I did (and I have.)
(By the way, I eventually get to a serious point below.)
Ten years ago (including probably to the day), I recall commenting on "What Will the Next Decade Be Called," or some such, in Salon or Slate or Usenet or God knows where in the pre-blogospheric era. Would it be the Aughts or the Naughts or the Zeros or the Double Zeros or the Ohs or the Oh-Ohs or the Double-Ohs or the Triple-Ohs or (my then-proposed) the Thousands?
God help me, I think that I may have actually handicapped the above choices, and maybe the Naughty-Aughts as well.
(By the way: I think that I probably wrote about the "Y2K crisis" ten years ago too -- can you imagine how that would be have played out here had DKos been able to be born a decade earlier?)
Ahem. Anyway, despite the genuine and heartfelt and loudly expressed differences of opinion among the sorts of people disposed to think about such things, there was one point of consensus:
By the end of the decade, we'll have figured it out.
And we arrive here today at the end of the decade and we find this:
We didn't figure it out.
Honestly, I think that you could have made great money ten years ago betting on this unthinkable outcome. How could we not figure this out? A recognized, formal name on a decade's birth certificate is a useful thing. Naming things makes them easier to discuss, to write about. Sure, some of the problem is that this only exists in verbal English, where "'00s" is too clunky to say, but surely one of the leading cultural lights of a decade ago -- The New York Times or CBS News or TIME Magazine or CNN or NPR or MTV or Saturday Night Live -- would have chosen a name and forced everyone to adopt it, wouldn't they? It's true that we don't have a French Academy that can issue proclamations of What Shall Be, Linguistically, but wouldn't someone grasp the bloody thistle and do it?
We had rationally presumed at the time that, as we got far into The Decade In Which This Is Being Written, the impetus to avoid circumlocutions like "The Decade In Which This Is Being Written" or "The Present Decade" or "The Current Decade" or "The Decade Ending in 2009" would surely be strong enough to force some sort of solution to be adopted. Aren't those sort of kludges too klugly (a word, note, coined during the Decade Ending in 2009, although probably not much read until the '10s!) to survive?
The last time I remember something that had to be named not getting named for a long time was the Scandal That Got Clinton Impeached. I recall Slate vainly and horrifyingly trying to stick the appellation "Flytrap" upon it, an effort for which everyone involved in generating and pursuing should have been fired and possibly shoved out a window as well. It ended up, over time, gelling into "The Lewinsky Affair" or "The Lewinsky Scandal," I suppose because the indignities that the former intern (always "the former intern") of that name had already gone through on the public stage were somehow not enough for justice to be done. But, sometimes the process of naming social phenomena works well ("Watergate," "Brangelina") and sometimes it doesn't ("the Iran-Contra Affair," "Bennifer") and some things we eventually decide are better off not named at all, the better to forget them.
You can't do that with a decade, though! We'll be referring to this time unit for ... for decades! And so, in the past three weeks or so, I've seen an increasing number of people who previously would have resorted to circumlocutions suddenly wielding terms like "The Aughts" or "The Zeros" with a studied nonchalance, as if they've been doing it all along, as if everyone should naturally understand what they mean as readily as if they said "the Nineties." And yes, we understand them, but the very fact that so many people seem to be choosing contradictory names shows that the cool assurance with which such terms are suddenly bandied about is a facade. It's too late, folks! If you wanted a consensus name for the decade, you shouldn't have waited until it was 99.5% over!
This problem isn't going away for at least three years, by the way, because the next decade, which we will probably refer to as "the Teens," doesn't actually enter the Teens until 2013. Until then, we are technically in our Pre-Teens. And I realize that the problem may not last forever, as this decade will in 50 years or so eventually get referred to as "the Turn of the Century," much as what seems to have happened to the decade ending in 1909, even though that term for the Teddy Roosevelt and first half of Taft years seems to get tossed around a lot less than those of other decades.
But in the meantime, for as long as many of us here will live, confusion and failed consensus shall reign supreme. This decade will be the proverbial child who never got named, to whom everyone refers to by one of various nicknames. Yes, if you use any of the terms I mention above, in the context of referring to a decade, people will probably get what you were talking about. But that's not the same as its having a name.
There is, I think, a lesson for us here on December the 31st, 2009, dammit, and it is this:
What has to happen sometimes doesn't happen.
That lesson applies to stopping global warming, to passing health care legislation, to keeping the Republicans out of power:
Just because it has to happen doesn't mean that it will happen.
If you want what has to happen to happen, sometimes you have to work for it. The passage of time doesn't resolve all conflicts; sometimes it only bypasses them -- and as it races ahead, it does so with or without us going along for the ride.
If our failure to name this decade has any value whatsoever, it is reminding us of this -- potentially forever. The logical result won't always happen. Sometimes it needs help. Our help.
And with that I wish all of you a Happy New Decade.