From Aught to Ought

The problem : What do we call the new decade we are about to enter? For decades it's been a no-brainer: the Sixties were—well, the 60s; the Seventies, the 70s. And so on. But what about 2000 through 2009? The 2Ks, the Zeros, the Ohs, the Zips, the Ones, the Singles, the Digits? Perhaps we should call them the "Aughts."

Problem. What do we call the new decade we are about to enter? How are we going to refer to it? This hasn't been an issue for many decades, since it's been a no-brainer to refer to the 1960s as "the Sixties," followed by the Seventies, the Eighties, and the Nineties.

But what about the decade 2000 through 2009? In a recent poll by USA TODAY, a number of suggestions were offered: The 2Ks, the Zeros, the Ohs, the Zips, the Ones, the Singles, the Digits, the Tens, the 2000s, the First Decade.

But the overwhelming favorite was: The Twenty-Aughts, or Aughts for short.

Aught is an Old English word for zero. It is still in use in Britain, but not used very much on this side of the Atlantic -- folks have joked, you know, that we are "two countries separated by a common language." But a few generations ago, people in America did refer to 1903 as "nineteen-aught-three."

Perhaps we should move into the new millennium with aughts in mind. And not just the aughts spelled with an "a" but ...