Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/73844/

There's a general theory in linguistics that if a society needs a word for something, they'll naturally come up with one. However, Alan Metcalf uses the problem of what to call the 00's as a counterexample in his book Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success. (Alas, I haven't yet read the book, so I can't comment more extensively than that.)

I think the main reason we haven't come up with a word for it as a society is because we still aren't talking about it as historical time, you know? Like maybe in a few years there will be enough talk about what happened in the "early 21st century" or something that a word will come into use, but for now I think I've only come across people talking about that decade a few times in so many years.

That sounds like an interesting book, Katya, you need to read it so I know if it is worth reading.

mic0 wrote:I think the main reason we haven't come up with a word for it as a society is because we still aren't talking about it as historical time, you know? Like maybe in a few years there will be enough talk about what happened in the "early 21st century" or something that a word will come into use, but for now I think I've only come across people talking about that decade a few times in so many years.

Counterexample: A WorldCat search returns over 11,000 titles published between 1990 and 1999 with the word "90s" in the title, implying that they were using that term for the decade during the decade itself. ( http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=ti%3A9 ... dblist=638 ) Based on that, I think that if there was an elegant, obvious word for the decade, we would have come up with it and started using it during the decade in question. That said, the phrase "turn of the century" didn't start to gain traction until the 1920s ( http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?co ... g=3&share= ), so maybe we will start using "turn of the millennium" or one of your suggestions in about 10 years. (And now I'm very intrigued by the idea of using different words for a time period while we're in that time period vs. when we're looking back on it historically.)

mic0 wrote:That sounds like an interesting book, Katya, you need to read it so I know if it is worth reading.

Ha! Will do.

That's interesting about the 90's! But it does seem like a slightly different situation since "90s" was pretty... obvious? It followed the pattern well.

Katya wrote:(And now I'm very intrigued by the idea of using different words for a time period while we're in that time period vs. when we're looking back on it historically.)

That was just a spur-of-the-moment thought I had but it could potentially be a factor. I'm surprised you found some evidence for a difference in how they referred to the early 1900s at different times, so it could be a similar thing happening now.

I think I saw on the board where someone called it the "Early Naughties."

I like that.

What did the Victorians call the first 20th-century decade while they were in it? Was the idea of dividing time that way not as much a thing?

It appears that they didn't do any better than we're doing at coming up with a good, concise way to refer to that decade. Later, as people have already suggested, "turn of the century" seems to have caught on a bit, but there were other awkward contenders too.

I would thumbs-up this if I could. I say the "ohs" in speaking. High school/college years works, too. Now that it's 2013, I say the teens. I think future generations will eventually say "the turn of this century" or, in America, "the Bush years." Very future generations will talk of the early millennium.

Also, just as people really mean 1968 when they talk about the sixties, there was a definite period between September 11, 2001 and the crash of late September 2008 which is one cultural unit, in my mind, and is only 7 years long. The first two years if the decade were an extension of the late '90s, in my mind, and it's been uninterrupted downer for five years, and may be until another Roaring Twenties.

I know that we're talking about decades, not centuries, but I'm curious what you think of this. I heard once that the 18th century as we think of it began in 1789 and ended in 1917 and that the 20th century began in 1917 and ended in 1991. Would you say the 21st century began in 1991 or 2001? Is it too early to tell?