Ah, the good old days! When we could say “the 40s” or “the 90s” and the words flowed easily and everyone understood each other.

But now… what? This century is not only uncomfortable to live in, it isn’t easy to refer to.

How to Write It

If you want to abbreviate a year, let’s use 2006, you can write ‘06.  Yes, there is only one apostrophe.

If you refer to the decade, for example, the first decade of the current century, or the decade just before ,do not place an apostrophe before the s. Write the ’00s and the ’90s or whatever. These sentences are spelled correctly:

“I taught school during the ’90s.”

“I went into foreclosure in the ’00s.”

How to Say It

Writing it is easy. Saying it all out loud brings complications.

The Year

’00s can be pronounced “the ohs,” the “oh-ohs, or “the zeros.” Technically, I understand all to be correct, but let’s face it “the zeros” is silly. People will laugh. I know I will.

If you want to refer to a single year, again 2006 will be my example, you can refer to it as “oh-six.”

Way, way back at the turn of the previous century, the expression “aught-six” was common. Aught is an archaic form of zero or nothing. (Yes, it’s aught. I am not misspelling ought. They are homophones: They sound alike.) I can’t recommend using aught. People won’t laugh, they’ll just look puzzled and ask what you mean. Skip having to explain yourself;  use 2006 or ‘oh-six to begin with.

The Decade

What to call 2000-2010? The Terrorism Decade? The War Decade? Time Magazine dubbed those years, understandably, The Decade from Hell: 9/11, Katrina, the Bush/Gore presidential voting debacle, swooning tech stocks in 2001, crashing economy in 2008, and too much war. Many people I know don’t refer to the decade with a particular term, as much as with a grimace and an abrupt wave of hand, as if to push the past further away.

Let’s refer to those years as The Turn of the Century. Sure, that term was also applied to the early 1900’s. But the context defines: If I spoke today about a job I lost at the turn of the century, would you think I meant 1906? If you read, this month, a biography of Teddy Roosevelt that spoke of the turn of the century, I doubt you’d be puzzled as to what years the author meant.

Once we get into the year 2013 and into successive decades (and they’ll be here before you know it), we’ll start saying “the Teens” and “the 20s,” just as people did during the 20th century (and probably did ever century before that).

The Century

This current year is Twenty Eleven, not Two Thousand Eleven. Many of us got into the habit, in the last decade, of saying Two thousand ……, rather than Twenty Oh Four, Twenty Oh Eight, Twenty Ten. But that decade is (thank heaven!) behind us, so let’s return to the common English practice of pronouncing a year without mentioning its thousand-ness.

After all, we don’t consider the Declaration of Independence to have been signed in Seventeen hundred and seventy six. And we don’t say that Columbus sailed the Ocean blue in One thousand four hundred and ninety two.

Good news: Next year is Twenty Twelve. How euphonious! The years coming up will roll trippingly off the tongue.