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
------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
More information about the Ads-l
mailing list