How very strange. This decade is more than half over, but remains nameless. This stands in stark contrast to a century’s worth of label-laden decades. Some even carried adjectives: the Roaring Twenties. Others were so defined by an event that they didn’t even need a number: the Depression. And those defined merely by numbers still carried a rich baggage of associations: the ’40s of global war and the Greatest Generation, the ’50s of Beatniks and Eisenhower, the counterculture ’60s of hippies, Vietnam and the moon shot, and the ‘80s evocative of the Reagan revolution and the rise of New Age beliefs.
But this decade staggers on from crisis to crisis, still nameless. Of course labels have been proposed: the zeros, oughts, naughts, naughties, nadas, zips, to name a few. But nothing has caught on, and frankly, I have yet to hear something euphonious enough to even be a candidate for catching on.
Perhaps the decade remains unnamed because it is awaiting its defining event? Or perhaps in the face of one astounding event after another, the cumulation of memory isn’t yet sufficient to give the decade it’s identity?