In retrospect, it might be recognized as a troubling harbinger that, ten years ago, no consensus could be reached in this country on what to call the decade upon which we were about to embark. The ohs? The double-ohs? The zeros? The zips? The nadas? The naughties? As the reassuringly comprehensible nineties were drawing to a close, all these were suggested as possible designations for the coming era. When Madison Avenue and the collective editorial boards of the nation’s newspapers failed to come up with a killer appellation in advance, there was at least confidence that, by decade’s end, a majority-pleasing solution to the problem of decennial nomenclature would have presented itself.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

As we near the end, however, we still don’t have a good collective name for the first decade of the twenty-first century—at least, not one beyond “the first decade of the twenty-first century,” which is gratifyingly lacking in cuteness but may be too wordy for practicality, particularly given contemporary constraints. (Call it that on Twitter, and you’ve used up a third of your character allotment.) Arguably, a grudging agreement has been reached on calling the decade “the aughts,” but that unfortunate term is rooted in a linguistic error. The use of “aught” to mean “nothing,” “zero,” or “cipher” is a nineteenth-century corruption of the word “naught,” which actually does mean nothing, and which, as in the phrase “all for naught,” is still in current usage. Meanwhile, the adoption of “the aughts” as the decade’s name only accelerates the almost complete obsolescence of the actual English word “aught,” a concise and poetic near-synonym for “anything” that has for centuries well served writers, including Shakespeare (“I never gave you aught,” Hamlet says to Ophelia, in an especially ungenerous moment, before she goes off and drowns) and Milton (“To do aught good never will be our task / But ever to do ill our sole delight,” Satan declares near the beginning of “Paradise Lost,” before slinking up to tempt Eve). To call the decade “the aughts” is a compromise that pleases no one, and that has more than a whiff of resigned settling about it.

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But perhaps that’s appropriate, since this turned out to be the decade in which there were no good answers. It began in overwrought hysteria: recall that, this time ten years ago, the fear was abroad that civilization would come to a standstill, if not an end, when the world’s computers failed to recognize a date that didn’t begin with the digits 1 and 9. Having readied ourselves for that disaster, the one that actually did materialize, a year and a half later—the terrorist attacks of September, 2001—came as a surprise, even, apparently, to those who had been privy to intelligence memos warning of impending harm from militant-Islamist quarters. It has been suggested that the appropriate designation for this decade might be “the post-9/11 era”—an unswingy if otherwise apposite sobriquet. Others argue that to name the decade thus would be letting the terrorists win—as if the cumulative casualties of war and the infringements of civil liberties that took place under President Bush were not already evidence of at least partial victory on that score.

The events of and reaction to September 11th seem to be the decade’s defining catastrophe, although it could be argued that it was in the voting booths of Florida, with their flawed and faulty machines, that the crucial historical turn took place. (In the alternate decade of fantasy, President Gore, forever slim and with hairline intact, not only reads those intelligence memos in the summer of 2001 but acts upon them; he also ratifies the Kyoto Protocol and invents something even better than the Internet.) And if September 11th marked the beginning of this unnameable decade, its end was signalled by President Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech, in which he spoke of what he called the “difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other,” and painstakingly outlined the absence of any good answers to the questions in question.

In between those two poles, the decade saw the unimaginable unfolding: the depravities of Abu Ghraib, and, even more shocking, their apparent lack of impact on voters in the 2004 Presidential election; the horrors of Hurricane Katrina and the flight of twenty-five thousand of the country’s poorest people to the only slightly less hostile environs of the Superdome; the grotesque inflation and catastrophic popping of a housing bubble, exposing an economy built not even on sand but on fairy dust; the astonishing near-collapse of the world financial system, and the discovery that the assumed ironclad laws of the marketplace were only about as reliable as superstition. And, after all this, the still more remarkable: the election of a certified intellectual as President, not to mention an African-American one.

There was the ascent of the digital realm—with the happy surrender, on the part of hundreds of millions, to the congenial omniscience and possibly less congenial omnipotence of Google, and the perplexingly popular appeal of making available online all manner of information of the sort formerly considered private. Who would have dreamed, at the decade’s outset, not only that something like Facebook would exist but that, thanks to it, anyone would be able to view photographs of the company’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, in pajama bottoms and with red-eye uncorrected, lounging in an armchair and clutching a Teddy bear to his chest? Or that anyone would want to? And what of those other unlikely innovations and unforeseen blights of the era—small plates, Bump for the iPhone, Sarah Palin, Chinese drywall, jeggings?

Given all that has emerged in the past ten years, the failure to invent a satisfactory name for the period seems overdetermined—a reflection of our sense that the so-called aughts were not all they ought to have been, and were so much less than they promised to be. With its intractable conflicts and its irresolvable crises, its astonishing accomplishments and its devastating failures, the decade just gone by remains unnamed and unclaimed, an orphaned era that no one quite wants to own, or own up to—or, truth be told, to have aught else to do with at all. ♦