Breaking news: I have discovered a gap in the English lexicon.
You know, in English we have phrases like ‘the twenties’, ‘the thirties’, ‘the forties’, and so on, to refer to the various decades. Yesterday I learnt a new word: ‘the noughties’, from an English magazine. The word refers to the first ten years of a century, such as 2000 to 2009.
Then I thought: What about the second ten years of a century? For example, how do you say 2010 to 2019 in two words?
So I posed the question to a few native-speakers, none of whom had any idea.
And this is ridiculous: We have words to refer to all the decades of a century, except for the second ten years!
(And Chinese is even more ridiculous because it doesn’t even have a word parallel to ‘the noughties’.)
Now that the second decade of this century has just begun, someone had better coin the term quickly, because we will need to be talking about this decade very often from now until 2019. And we don’t want to be handicapped by this gap in the English lexicon.
POSTCRIPT (6 Jan)
Thanks to Becky Cheung, who provided the following link to another article that discussed this issue. Some possible candidates are suggested in this article.
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