We ought to name decade for sake of oldies radio and alumni clubs

Tuesday's inauguration of Barack Obama as 44th president of the United States will kick off a new era. And we still don't know what to call the old one.

All jokes about the Bush Years of Living Dangerously aside, what do we call the decade that is almost over? While I can tell people I grew up in the '60s and '70s and finished college in the '80s, the lack of a decent decade moniker forces younger folks to be specific, as in: "I graduated in two-thousand and eight, but my girlfriend is in the class of twenty-ten."

That works now. But what will they do when they are my age and attending a massive homecoming celebration? My grandfather graduated from Purdue University in 1903 as part of the class of "Aught Three." At reunions, alums from that decade would mingle under the "Aughts" sign. My 21st Century spell-checker doesn't even think "aught" is a word.

"Aught is what I run into most for the first decade of the last century, but I have not heard it used much of late," says Ann Keating, a professor of history at North Central College in Naperville. Don't look for the alumni association to get the aught ball rolling when it comes to naming this decade.

"For the most part, we've referred to this decade as the Two-Thousands," offers Adrian Aldrich, director of alumni relations at North Central. The 2002 graduate adds that he is not thrilled with the name.

Of course not. The "Two-Thousands" take in the entire millennium. If an alumni association labeled me as a member of the "Nineteen-Hundreds" classes, I assume I'd be in the same database as my "Aughts" grandfather.

Back in the 1980s when the artist now known as Prince was about to become the artist formerly known as Prince, he sang of the year "two-thousand zero-zero" while partying like it was 1999. But if you add two zeros onto the end of 2000, isn't that the year 200000?

All those zeros inspire Arlington Heights writer Charles Dickinson.

"I like 'the zips' for this decade," Dickinson says. "Zero good has happened, yet it seems to have flown by."

In a column back in the '90s, I tried to come up with a slogan along the lines of "the Roaring '20s" to encapsulate the years 2000 through 2009. I figured a T-shirt declaring the wearer a "Man of the Big Os" might prove popular.

But nothing caught on.

"If I'm a Man of the '90s now," I asked my wife back in 1998, "what will I be at the end of the next decade."

"Oh, probably still a Man of the '90s," she responded knowingly.

"Perhaps the 'Os' will take off. It might work better than zero," Keating offers. "But your grandfather's language is what I know."

If oldies radio stations are playing hits from the '70s, '80s and '90s now, what do they start playing when they regurgitate the melodies of Britney Spears, Kanye West, Outkast, Coldplay, Alicia Keyes, Beyoncé or even Jimmy Eat World? A decade that began with the Baha Men asking "Who Let the Dogs Out?" needs a name.

"It just sounds strange to say 'music from the 2000s,'" says radio legend John Records Landecker. "It doesn't come trippingly off the tongue, as they say."

So an oldies station can't play hits from the '80s, '90s and aughts?

"I think in 50 years, you could say, 'way back in aught two,' but not now," says Landecker, a Hall of Fame radio personality who hosts his nationally syndicated '70s music show locally on WLS-FM 94.7 from 7 p.m. until midnight on Sunday. He also hosts a talk radio show on the WLS-AM 890 from noon to 3 p.m. on Saturday.

"You could say 'the first decade of the century' or 'the century's first decade,'" Landecker muses before coming up with a name he likes. "Music from the '80s, '90s and up to 2010.' Now that works. That's what I'd go with."

Scott Pedersen, a procurement engineer-turned-entrepreneur at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has been pondering this question for decades. Having grown up with K-tel-like music compilations featuring sounds of the "Super '70s," "Heartbeats of the '80s" and such, the 41-year-old Pedersen decided our current decade should be the "naughty aughties."

His trademark for the name was granted on Sept. 10, 2001, but the next day's news made marketing his idea difficult.

"I've got about 12-to-15 grand wrapped up in it," Pedersen says of his various trademarks, T-shirts, www.naughtyaughties.com and the like. It sounds good and works numerically.

"To me," Pedersen says, "there is no other choice."

If we don't adopt "naughty-aughties" then all his hard work is for naught.