The Noughties

[Scott5114]

Another problem with "the noughties" is that, at least in the US, it's homophonous with "the naughties", and then you're stuck explaining to the person who hasn't heard it before that that span of ten years did nothing wrong, you mean "nought" as in zero, and...in the end it's easier to use the longer but more readily understood "2000s".

I agree. I just think that, in general, even outside the context of decades, there should be some universal term for 0-9, and another for 10-19. Preferably, it should meet two criteria: (a) maximum length of three syllables, and (b) ends with "-ies".

There should be a gender-neutral version of "sir" or "ma'am", too (sometimes you can't tell or it's not important), but there's not. Some blank spots in the English language just never get filled.

[webny99]

Some blank spots in the English language just never get filled.

On a somewhat-related note, I'd venture that this is specific to the US, not the English language.

Britain seems to have a term for everything (although I'm not sure about the "sir"/"ma'am" thing), much more so than the US. Take "queue" and "line", for example. You don't really need a separate term for a line of people, but having one allows you to add clarity without adding length.

[freebrickproductions]

I just call the first decade of this millennium the "2000s"

That no longer works for "1900's", which now refers to the entire century, not just 1900-1909.

That's why I said "right now". I'm hoping for some nick-names to eventually happen for the 2000s and 2010s.

[Beltway]

I personally like to say the phrase "twenty-aughts"  when referring to the first decade of the 2000s, unfortunately this hasn't caught on. The 1900s first decade was referred to as the "nineteen-aughts" .

How about the twenty-zeroes?

[davewiecking]

I personally refer to them as "the Aughts' or "the Aughties"; Merriam Webster agrees that this is acceptable.

https://www.dmjuice.com/story/entertainment/2015/07/30/fashion-now/30740947/

That story just reminded me what a smokeshow Rachel Bilson was in the OC 15 years ago.

I'd argue that Ms. Bilson's outfit would be right at home in (at least part of) any of the decades I've been alive, except the 50's.

[english si]

However, I'd expect that in Britain, where the term originated, it sounds more like it's spelled: "nought-ies" with emphasis on the "t".

Not the masses of (mostly southern English) Brits that also T-glottal like you AmE speakers!

It's somewhat of a pun on 'naughty' and pronounced the same way with an 's' on the end. The OED says /ˈnɔːtɪz/ and I glottalise the t and throw an intrusive 'r' in there to get something like 'nor-ease' if I'm really hamming up my accent and exaggerating it. But when I think about it I do the OED pronounciation - because T-glottalization for Southern English doesn't happen when speaking carefully (ie thinking about it). It's somewhere between the two - barely pronouced t, and even less pronounced r (I not only use intrusive-r, but r-colour vowels, so I'm a total mess there and can't easily tell about whether I'm doing one or t'other).

Then again, the word "nought" itself is rarely heard here in the US, so maybe that explains it.

Ditto Britain. Someone coined the pun in the late 90s, it took off, and it was added to the dictionary in 2001.

This decade is simply the 'tens', like 'nineties', etc. And even 'noughties' fits that model: begin with the number of the first year. Now, ok, numbers over twenty take the form umpty-one, etc so 'twenties' make sense as all the years begin 'twenty'. And the 'noughties' years take the form oh-one, etc (but the ohies make no sense). Most of the tens do have 'ten' in them, but in a corrupted form: three-ten becomes thirteen.

It seems to be used more by the British. I have seen the word written out (or typed-out), but haven't actually met anyone actually say the word "Noughties" or "Aughties", probably because it sounds like the word naughties

That's the point of the word. It's said here precisely because it sounds like naughties, and thus was use humourously in the nineties until we realised it was the only word we had for the 00s, and thus used it seriously (though there's still a little fighting on that) as the term for the decade.

Britain seems to have a term for everything (although I'm not sure about the "sir"/"ma'am" thing)

We don't, AFAIK. However pushing gender-neutral terms was only something that took off in the noughties, and addressing people as "sir"/"ma'am" isn't big among those wanting gender-neutral words (as they are also not keen on hierarchy)

Take "queue" and "line", for example. You don't really need a separate term for a line of people, but having one allows you to add clarity without adding length.

Queue and line are different concepts: queue has an order, line is just a 1-d shape.

Queue also doesn't just refer to people. "Can you do this?" "I'll add it to the queue".

American's calling it a 'line' is because they don't understand the British national pasttime, plus they have to conflate words as they need concepts explained every time, eg 'sidewalk'

[bugo]

The iPhone was no greater of an invention than any smartphone was. It is just a dumbed down version of an Android phone. It is nothing special. I had an iPhone and I hated it. You can change many more settings on an Android phone than you can on an iPhone. And the Android phones are a far better value.

[bugo]

One thing you could probably say was that the late 2000s decade saw the return of approachable performance cars that looked appealing becoming mainstream again.  I still remember the 2008 Challenger and the Camaro concept (which began production in 2010) were game changers.  In the 2010s even vanilla cars are starting to become visually appealing again which was a nice change from the 80s/90s/00s box-to-jelly bean area of car design.

Ewwwwwwwwww really? I find the vast majority of contemporary cars to be hideously ugly. The last generation Hyundai Sonata, while a fine car, was one of the ugliest cars I've ever seen. It's funny that the most attractive cars built today are retro versions of '60s and '70s cars. Modern cars have weird angles and character lines that randomly go in all sorts of directions and crossovers are fat and they look like an obese person sitting on a barstool that is too small for them. There are a few good looking modern cars but most of them are just gross. The Nissan Juke is probably the ugliest car I've ever seen. The new Honda Civic's rear end is disgusting. The new Toyota Prius is batshit ugly. Give me a '90s jellybean car any day over a modern car.

[bugo]

There should be a gender-neutral version of "sir" or "ma'am", too (sometimes you can't tell or it's not important), but there's not. Some blank spots in the English language just never get filled.

I used to work at a call center for a cell phone company, and one day somebody called in and you couldn't tell if they were a man or a woman. The call got escalated to a supervisor and the supervisor couldn't tell the caller's gender either. He got a bit frustrated because the caller was being an idiot and instead of saying "sir" or "ma'am" he said "person". We laughed about that one for the rest of the time I worked there.

[bugo]

It seems like things happen slower these days than they did in the past. Take cars for example. A 1955 model car looked completely different from the same model in 1945, and a 1965 looked just as different than a 1955. A 1975 model was just as different. Try telling a 2005 car from a 2015 car. There's not a whole lot of difference. Music is another example. There were definite trends and eras that sometimes only lasted a couple of years in the past. Now it all seems to run together. Maybe things just don't change as often these days or maybe I'm just getting old.

[Beltway]

The iPhone was no greater of an invention than any smartphone was. It is just a dumbed down version of an Android phone. It is nothing special. I had an iPhone and I hated it. You can change many more settings on an Android phone than you can on an iPhone. And the Android phones are a far better value.

I agree fully, and Rush's "stealth ads" where he is regularly hawking Apple products, long ago turned me against buying any Apple projects including the iPhone.

[hotdogPi]

The iPhone was no greater of an invention than any smartphone was. It is just a dumbed down version of an Android phone. It is nothing special. I had an iPhone and I hated it. You can change many more settings on an Android phone than you can on an iPhone. And the Android phones are a far better value.

I agree fully, and Rush's "stealth ads" where he is regularly hawking Apple products, long ago turned me against buying any Apple projects including the iPhone.

Smartphones in general were still a major development of the noughties, regardless of brand.

I agree. I just think that, in general, even outside the context of decades, there should be some universal term for 0-9, and another for 10-19. Preferably, it should meet two criteria: (a) maximum length of three syllables, and (b) ends with "-ies".

0-9 is "single digits", but that doesn't work for decades.

[Beltway]

Smartphones in general were still a major development of the noughties, regardless of brand.

1990s.  Quoting Wikipedia --

The first commercially available device that could be properly referred to as a "smartphone" began as a prototype called "Angler" developed by Frank Canova in 1992 while at IBM and demonstrated in November of that year at the COMDEX computer industry trade show.  A refined version was marketed to consumers in 1994 by BellSouth under the name Simon Personal Communicator.  In addition to placing and receiving cellular calls, the touchscreen-equipped Simon could send and receive faxes and emails.  It included an address book, calendar, appointment scheduler, calculator, world time clock, and notepad, as well as other visionary mobile applications such as maps, stock reports and news.  The term "smart phone" or "smartphone" was not coined until a year after the introduction of the Simon, appearing in print as early as 1995, describing AT&T's PhoneWriter Communicator.

In 1999, the Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo released the first smartphones to achieve mass adoption within a country.

[jeffandnicole]

There should be a gender-neutral version of "sir" or "ma'am", too (sometimes you can't tell or it's not important), but there's not. Some blank spots in the English language just never get filled.

I used to work at a call center for a cell phone company, and one day somebody called in and you couldn't tell if they were a man or a woman. The call got escalated to a supervisor and the supervisor couldn't tell the caller's gender either. He got a bit frustrated because the caller was being an idiot and instead of saying "sir" or "ma'am" he said "person". We laughed about that one for the rest of the time I worked there.

I bowled with someone in my teens, and we couldn't tell if that person was male or female either.  Just her looks and everything made it hard to tell who she was, and her name could be used by either sex (think Pat from SNL).  We joked about watching her go into the bathroom just to see which one she used (this was all way before today's era of choosing whatever you identify with).

BTW, my use of she and her above is intentional...turns out she was a girl.

[formulanone]

Smartphones in general were still a major development of the noughties, regardless of brand.

1990s.  Quoting Wikipedia --

The first commercially available device that could be properly referred to as a "smartphone" began as a prototype called "Angler" developed by Frank Canova in 1992 while at IBM and demonstrated in November of that year at the COMDEX computer industry trade show.  A refined version was marketed to consumers in 1994 by BellSouth under the name Simon Personal Communicator.  In addition to placing and receiving cellular calls, the touchscreen-equipped Simon could send and receive faxes and emails.  It included an address book, calendar, appointment scheduler, calculator, world time clock, and notepad, as well as other visionary mobile applications such as maps, stock reports and news.  The term "smart phone" or "smartphone" was not coined until a year after the introduction of the Simon, appearing in print as early as 1995, describing AT&T's PhoneWriter Communicator.

In 1999, the Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo released the first smartphones to achieve mass adoption within a country.

There's numerous inventions which took 10-20 years from invention until they achieved mass-appeal. It's not meaningful to define a cultural change in which a tiny fraction of the populace has access or experience with it.

The first automobiles, aircraft, radios, telephones, televisions, computers, and access to the internet were invented decades before infrastructure existed to support nationwide adoption.

The first product of its kind usually suffers from the fate of being a historical footnote.

Naturally, the iPhone wasn't first...the various Palm Pilots, Blackberry devices, and phones with several included gadgets preceded it. But it changed the industry (for better or for worse) and heralded a second or possibly third generation of the smartphone.

[20160805]

I refer to the decade as the 2000s or in short the 00s (along similar lines to 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc.) and pronounce it "two-thousands".

As the decade that contained the majority of my adolescence, which lasted from about 2004 to 2011, let me just say that late 2006 through mid 2010 were the worst years of my life.

[webny99]

Take "queue" and "line", for example. You don't really need a separate term for a line of people, but having one allows you to add clarity without adding length.

Queue and line are different concepts: queue has an order, line is just a 1-d shape.

A queue is a type of line; here's the primary definition:

queue
kyo͞o/
noun 1. BRITISH a line or sequence of people or vehicles awaiting their turn to be attended to or to proceed.

[Henry]

I agree. I just think that, in general, even outside the context of decades, there should be some universal term for 0-9, and another for 10-19. Preferably, it should meet two criteria: (a) maximum length of three syllables, and (b) ends with "-ies".

0-9 is "single digits", but that doesn't work for decades.

00-09 would be "double-zeroes" or "double-O's", and 10-19 would be the "teens". So those two groups would be the exception to this rule.

[hbelkins]

The iPhone was no greater of an invention than any smartphone was. It is just a dumbed down version of an Android phone. It is nothing special. I had an iPhone and I hated it. You can change many more settings on an Android phone than you can on an iPhone. And the Android phones are a far better value.

I have an iPhone, and I agree with you in many ways. I like the iPhone's interface, probably because I'm more used to it. For awhile, my work phone was an Android, and it took a little adjusting to because I was familiar with the iPhone's controls and buttons. I chose to get an iPhone because I've used Apple computers since 1987 and the progression from a Mac computer to an Apple mobile device seemed logical. But I really dislike the way Apple controls what you can install on the phone. You don't have to go through the Google Play Store to install an app. You can install it directly from the developer if you want. Unlike Apple, which requires either iTunes or a jailbroken device with Rock or Cydia. And Androids are cheaper, as well, and much more expandable since most allow the use of a MicroSD card for music, apps and pictures.

If I wasn't so heavily invested in iDevice apps (and the fact that my work devices now are Apple, an iPhone and an iPad, which lets me use work apps on my personal devices and vice versa) I would definitely consider an Android phone.

Naturally, the iPhone wasn't first...the various Palm Pilots, Blackberry devices, and phones with several included gadgets preceded it. But it changed the industry (for better or for worse) and heralded a second or possibly third generation of the smartphone.

My first contact with a data-enabled mobile device was in 2000 or 2001, when I noticed I was getting emails from upper management personnel from the agency where I worked that had signature lines, "Sent from a BlackBerry mobile device." I was thinking at the time it would be handy to get emails on the go. (My cell phone at the time was a bag phone.)

[english si]

A queue is a type of line; here's the primary definition:

Not really in British English. Technically it is, I guess, but that dictionary definition is about the only time you'll see the word line to describe a queue in British English.

It's similar to saying 'a vector is a line'. Well, yes, it is, but that description doesn't get at the heart of it. For queue, the important words in the definition are 'sequence' and 'turn'.

And restricting it to people / vehicles is a nonsense with that definition - 'play queue' is something very common this side of the naughties, with those naughties inventions of video and music streaming (though I believe earlier music/video players on computers had play queue too, and likewise DJs would add requests to the queue or queue up a play list).

[hbelkins]

A queue is a type of line; here's the primary definition:

Not really in British English. Technically it is, I guess, but that dictionary definition is about the only time you'll see the word line to describe a queue in British English.

It's similar to saying 'a vector is a line'. Well, yes, it is, but that description doesn't get at the heart of it. For queue, the important words in the definition are 'sequence' and 'turn'.

And restricting it to people / vehicles is a nonsense with that definition - 'play queue' is something very common this side of the naughties, with those naughties inventions of video and music streaming (though I believe earlier music/video players on computers had play queue too, and likewise DJs would add requests to the queue or queue up a play list).

They might add requests to the queue, but they cue up a play list.

[webny99]

Well, has anything of significance changed since 2008?
Did anything of significance change between 1998 and 2008*?
I can think of a few discussion points for both.

[WR of USA]

My parents always talk about how society has become more willing to give up their privacy for tougher security as a result of 9/11.

[Beltway]

I refer to the decade as the 2000s or in short the 00s (along similar lines to 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc.) and pronounce it "two-thousands".

I do hear that expression, but they are "tens", not "thousands".

[MisterSG1]

My parents always talk about how society has become more willing to give up their privacy for tougher security as a result of 9/11.

Indeed they are right, seeing by the age you posted, that indeed makes you born after the awful events of 9/11.

To be honest, I like to think of the 90s ending on 9/11, sure there was the whole Y2K phenomenon and all that and 2000/2001 aren't actually literally in the 1990s, but geopolitically, society changed massively after that date. The 1990s were also very different geopolitically than the 1980s, in fact, the 90s were probably the most optimistic time ever. While in contrast post 9/11 are dark times.