In less than a week it will be 2012. As usual, a whole bunch of people are going to mistakenly write ’11 or 2011 on their checks and other places for a few days before they get used to the new year, and that’s normal. Banks are used to this, by the way.

Since year 2000, there’s been more than a little confusion about how to write the year and what to call specific decades.

Prior to 2000, it was OK to write years in two-digit form because the number exceeded what Gregorian calendar numeric months and day-of-month’s could provide. The month never exceeds 12, and the day never exceeds 31, so writing 97 for year 1997 was OK. That changed when 2000 rolled around.

In general practice, you should always write the year as the full four digits. And as funny as this sounds, it should remain that way until year 2032.

Names of decades

2000-2009

Three names can apply here. It’s either "The Early Two-Thousands", "The Two-Thousands" or "The 2000s".

Wrong way: "The Aughts". Aught is defined archaically as zero. Calling the 2000s the aughts literally translates to "the zeroes".

Wrong way: "The Noughts". This is wrong because nought literally means to be nothing; by saying noughts, that means multiple nothings.

Wrong way: "The Oh-Oh’s", as in the literal pronunciation of "00s". This one is just stupid.

2010-2019

This is generally agreed upon to be "The Twenty-Tens", "The Tens" or "The 10s".

2020 and beyond

You can pretty much guess what these will be called. The 20s, 30s, 40s and so on. Sometimes there may be confusion with the question of, "Um.. which century are you referring to?", but it shouldn’t cause too much of a problem.

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