Then remember this as the second decade of the new millennium begins. This year should be referred to as “twenty-ten”, not “two-thousand ten” (no matter what the Vancouver Olympics are being hyped as.)
And yes, I know it's not technically the start of the new decade until next year but just like everyone celebrating the turn of the Millennium in 2000 instead of 2001, sometimes you just can't fight popular opinion.
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I don't think there's any chance the “two thousand” business will persist – can you imagine pronouncing, oh, 2037 that way? (Although, I suppose that's still fewer syllables than saying 1999 in French requires.)
I suspect people will eventually – retroactively – start pronouncing this past decade using “twenty-oh-whatever” instead of “two thousand and”, too.
…I still want to know what to call this decade. There're the Eighties, and the Nineties, and then what? If we haven't made up our collective minds about that at this point, maybe we never will. (I want to call it the Oughts, like people did for the 1900s, but I don't think that'll catch on.) The Two Thousands, maybe, but that looks weird when you spell it out…
/insomnia-driven trivia 🙂
There was a lot of discussion around the turn of the millennium but I don't think a unanimous choice was ever reached on a name for this past decade – I've seen oughts, naughts, naughties, oh-ohs among many others.
A quick Google search seems to indicate the same lack of consensus.