Personally excited to enter the twenties so we can refer to decades by standard nomenclature again!

Wow I hadn't thought about that. I also think most people haven't yet realised this is the last year of the current decade!

wait what happened to March-Dec of 2019?

Since there was no 0 AD, we count decades from 1 - 10, not 0 - 9. yes that's stupid

No. Nobody ever does that.

We count centuries that way, because we say "1st century", "20th century", "21st century". (That is, "20th century AD".) Ordinal numbers, based on the year 1 AD.

Nobody says "178th decade", or "213th decade". Decades are cardinal numbers. Nobody starts "the decade" in the 1 year.

> Nobody start "the decade" in the 1 year.

wow rude, I do. I think the 60s started 1961-01-01 and understand that people usually mean "the years that give a quotient of 196 when divided by 10".

I understand that we use ordinals to refer to centuries, also I understand how that's unrelated to which specific years are in a decade/century/millennium

fun fact the Australian constitution came into force on the 1st of January, 1901, aligning with the starting boundary of the 20th century.

So if someone mentioned something nice happening in 1960 you'd say "yeah the Fifties were great!" ?

wow rude again, that's not 'assuming the best intent of the commentator' and is against this site's code of conduct

> [I] understand that people usually mean "the years that give a quotient of 196 when divided by 10".

since I'm not a pedantic sicko that gets off on telling people they're wrong and lording my hugely advanced intellect over them, I use human words for genuine natural interactions.

Noughties, teens, twenties.

Despite many people's best efforts "the oughts" never quite caught on like they did turn of last century.

It’s “aughts”, which is a term for zero, but rarely used outside certain contexts. I prefer it, but it’s not surprising it didn’t catch on.

Otherwise I greatly prefer “the early 2000s”. It’s not very precise, but it’s more precise than “the 2000’s” which can include the year 2999.

That'll sort it itself out over the coming decades; but the other interesting one to me is that a sizeable group (majority?) of people are still saying "two thousand nineteen" instead of "twenty nineteen". I'm pretty sure I stopped using the former shortly after 2009 ended. I wonder if that'll stick for the whole century.

In the other language I speak fluently (Portuguese) there never was an abbreviation, it was always the full "one thousand nine hundred ninety" as opposed to "nineteen ninety". In that case "two thousand" is already an improvement, but for some reason it bothers me in English.

Interesting. I definitely prefer “twenty nineteen”, but can’t swear I would never call it “two thousand nineteen”. It might end up sticking around until 2100.

Ah, spelling, old foe.

What contexts do you generally see it used in, out of curiosity?

I'm assuming it still appears in places besides revivals of "The Music Man"

This is the first thing that comes to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.30-06_Springfield

I’ve only ever heard this pronounced thirty aught-six.

and for the sophisticated redneck

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.25-06_Remington

Also double-aught buckshot.

Better than "the naughts" or "the dub dubs" is it not? What do you call it?

My personal favorite is "the noughties".

This is the only one i've heard in normal use.

Never heard the dub dubs but I’ll start using that immediately

Goes well with Dubya.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_of_President...

It's the best term I've seen for it so far. What term do you use?

I've seen "aughts" used and understood that fine. When I read this, I thought it referred to the entire century.

Either that, or occasionally I just roll "nineteen-nineties" into "twenty-hundreds" or "twenty-ohs".

two thousand and X (200x) here

I do