What should we call this crazy decade? I’ve been calling it “The Aughts,” but is that good enough? Guest critic Tray Butler, an author an illustrator of enormous awesomeness, doesn’t think so…

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Not the Aughts: Go With the Ohs

By Tray Butler

As much as I’ve been digging Mark’s countdown of the 101 Best Songsof the Aughts, I can’t help stumbling over semantics. Seriously, are we really settling on “aughts” to describe this debacle of a decade?

With 2009 staggering to a close, I’m seeing the term show up in stories here and there as the inevitable decade-in-review deluge begins to bubble up. Music writers seem especially keen on the sound of it, for some reason, or maybe they’re just an obvious group prone to list-making and navel-gazing.

No offense meant to anyone, but to me “aughts” comes across as both pretentious and antiquated, with visions of buggy whips and bootstraps that are worlds away from the whiz-bang digital flavor of our current age. “Aughts” sounds a little too much like “ought,” one of those archaic holdovers from Middle English that today feels awkward on the tongue. I just can’t hear “aughts” thrown around in casual conversation. Can you imagine, 10 years from now: “Dude, that old Blackberry you had was sooo aughts.” Um, no thanks.

People tend to wrinkle their noses when they hear the word “aughts” —though, to be fair, no one I’ve mentioned this to has offered a better alternative. Terms like “the zeros,” “the 2000’s,” “the new millennium” and, worst of all, “the naughties” all miss the mark.

I know I’m not the first word nerd to wrestle this conundrum; Slate’s Timothy Noah wrote an excellent piece on naming the decade in 2005 that holds every bit as true today. As Noah pointed out, the New York Times tried to beat everyone to the punch by declaring that the first decade of the 21st century should be called “the ohs”
way back in the 1980s. (A quick search of the Times site shows that the old gray lady seems to have ignored her own advice, though she’s also stayed off the “aughts” bandwagon, somehow.)

Now, with just 15 weeks left until 2010 hits, I find myself agreeing with the Times. Of all the terms I’ve heard floating around out there, I believe “the ohs” best sums up the spirit of the era. These past 10 years have been positively swimming in “oh” moments, as in, “Oh hell, did the Supreme Court seriously just hand the election to George W. Bush?”
Or, “Oh my god, did we really just invade Iraq for no legitimate reason?” Or even, “Oh shit, if Britney Spears flashes her cha-cha at the paparazzi one more time, I think I might puke in my mouth.”

“Oh!” also speaks to the financial meltdown of the past year, which Time called the end of the Age of Excess. “O” is for over-indulgence.

I like the elegance of “oh,” which can evoke both surprise and resignation. And not to get all crispy and New Agey here, but the “O” says something about both emptiness and completion, a people who have come full circle and now find themselves back at the start.

This has been a terrifically turbulent decade, defined by the two bookends of 9-11 and the Great Recession. Or, on a more positive note, marked by the worldwide celebration of the new millennium and the outpouring of hope and optimism we saw during last year’s Obama lovefest. (There’s another “O” for you.)

True, “the ohs” has its flaws and might cause confusion when written as “the ’00s.” Using “the aughts” appears to be gaining traction as a meme, and it may already be too late to stop it from becoming the
phrase of choice.

Then again, given the state of the global economy, perhaps we should be arguing for “the owes” instead. Oh, the humanity!

Tray Butler is an author and illustrator currently based in London. His travel guide, the Moon Atlanta handbook, is now available from Avalon Travel. Read more at Trayb.com.