FED: Oh, for a name for the nameless decade

AAP General News (Australia)
02-02-1999
FED: Oh, for a name for the nameless decade

By Doug Conway, Senior Correspondent

SYDNEY, Feb 2 AAP - Someone better come up with a name for the nameless decade before we're
actually in it.

The years between 2000 and 2010 loom as a linguistic no-man's land.

When the eighties ended, everyone looked forward to the nineties.

What do we gaze ahead to now? The nothings? The ohs? The zips? The zilches?

And what of specific years in the approaching decade?

It doesn't jar to talk about events of the past like the '56 Olympics.

But the '4 games? The '5 crash? The '6 drought? The '7 uprising? Not likely. And the class
of '8 would sound like the number of students at a private prep school.

How are people going to refer to the next decade in ordinary conversation, as they might
refer to the Roaring Twenties, the Swinging Sixties or the Greedy Eighties?

The Brave Zeros just doesn't have the right ring.

Phrases like "a child of the seventies" have entered the lexicon. But what will we call
those soon to be born? Children of the Noughts? Children of the Noughties might be closer to
the mark.

Sydney might think it has set the tone with its "two thousand" Olympics.

But they could hardly be called the double-0 Games.

That approach would lead seven years later to things like the double-0-7 election, and
everyone would think James Bond was running for office.

Films like "2001 - A Space Odyssey" may have conditioned people to use the words "two
thousand".

But that movie was made when no-one knew how to spell millennium, let alone what it meant.
In an age when celluloid epics had to be BIG, who could imagine crowds flocking to see a
measly old "One - A Space Odyssey"?

Perhaps the computer age will reign supreme.

The boffins have already made their preference clear.

The millennium bug - the programming quirk that threatens digitalised civilisation as we
know it - is called "Y2K", for year 2000.

Which might encourage the computer-minded to make statements like: "We're going to the
States in 2K1" or "We're getting married in 2K4".

The problem with that is every year will sound like a Sydney radio station.

What about using C for century? Maybe not. C1 and C2 would sound like the new generation of
bananas in pyjamas.

M for millennium? Only if you want each year to sound like a British freeway.

Besides, that would entail getting everyone to agree on when the new millennium actually
starts - just after the end of 1999 or, as it really does, just after the end of 2000.

And that problem makes this one look easy.

AAP RTV dc/ms/de

KEYWORD: DECADE

1999 AAP Information Services Pty Limited (AAP) or its Licensors.