mid-aughts

Chris F Waigl chris at LASCRIBE.NET
Wed Mar 14 21:55:35 UTC 2007


sagehen wrote:

>> "Mid-aughts" is a useful term that will likely grow even more useful
>> in retrospect, as is often the case with such temporal labels. Note
>> that it has already appeared attributively ("mid-aughts America",
>> "mid-aughts tech story") and predicatively ("painfully mid-aughts",
>> "very mid-aughts").
>>
>>
>  Have "noughts" or "naughts" totally disappeared from our language? We used
> to say "back in aught-three" for comic effect for stuff that went on in an
> earlier period.  Now it appears that that particular bit of silliness will
> be taken to mean 2003!
> AM
>

On this side of the English-speaking world, "noughties" seems to be
winning out. Here's a bunch of examples from the Guardian:
http://xrl.us/vbkp .

Chris Waigl

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