Naming the decade that was

So what should we call this decade now coming to a close?

Once it was over, the decade from 1900 to 1909 came to be called the “Aughts.” But the word wasn’t widely popular and didn’t have much staying power. And it sounds archaic now.

Some updated suggestions:

The Naughties (or the Caughties): for Larry Craig, David Vitter, Ken Lay, John Edwards, John Ensign, Eliot Spitzer, Bernie Madoff, Mark Sanford, Tiger Woods, etc. But, really, has there been a decade without cheaters?

The Haughties: there’s been no shortage of outrage and disdain over everything political, from the ending of the 2000 Presidential race to the ending of President Obama’s first year in office. Dictionary.com defines haughty as “scornfully arrogant, supercilious” and that certainly defined a lot of our political “debate” this decade.

The Oughties: as in we ought to have known better when it came to WMD, Enron, AIG and Bernie Madoff. The list goes on, which leads to…

The Naughts: as in, “I started this decade with nothing and still have most of it left.” Whatever the name, this past 10 years may be remembered most for the fortunes amassed by a few but lost by many.

The Washington Post ran a story this weekend on what some sources describe as linguistic laziness over failing to slap a name on this decade.

The story includes some other possibilities: the Zeroes, the Twenty Hundreds and the Oh Ohs, which suggests an alternate of the Uh Ohs. But the linguists who talked to the Post dismiss most of these as silly, too long or otherwise unadoptable.

Ultimately, a name may surface 10 or 20 years from now when we say, “It was a tumultuous decade. The dot-com bubble burst, we were attacked, went to war–in two different countries, debt spiraled out of control and then the economy crashed. That was the ____.”

What word will you use?