Order, order

In The Guardian, Marina Hyde weighs in the whole Noughties list thing. Although that’s not enough to stop her own paper from identifying the 50 books that defined the decade. How many have you read?

And with regards to the raw material of books, Countdown’s very own Susie Dent asks for our words of the decade.

Next!

It took us a long time to settle on ‘The Noughties’ as the label for the decade, and there are still plenty of people who aren’t convinced. Not surprisingly, there’s no consensus on where we’ll be from the beginning of next month. Here’s one Australian suggestion: The One-ders.

Not convinced? OK then, what do you suggest we call it?

Bum rap

And as the Observer Music Monthly just fails to make it to the next decade, they dub Beyoncé the artist of the current one (although the readers don’t seem to share the enthusiasm). That said, she has introduced an excellent new word to the Noughties lexicon:

That’s what she said

Flipping through the NME’s commemorative Noughties edition is slightly disturbing for an old fart like me, not least because the editor reveals that as the new millennium dawned, she’d just turned 18. But they do offer a few decade-specific words and phrases that escaped our linguistic dustbuster. (See pp 167-174.)

Cougar (noun) A sexually aggressive older woman prone to preying on young men.

Fail (noun) A fail is not quite the same as a failure: the latter is something that wakes you up in cold sweats at 3am, while a fail is more of a matter for light-hearted ritual public humiliation in a knickers-tucked-into-your-skirt kind of way.

Nang (adjective) London kid word for good. Acceptable if you’re 14 and from Hackney.

Nintendonitis (noun) Wii-Fit related injuries prove that even pretend exercise can be dangerous.

Rewriting the script

Not so much a Noughties story, more one for the teens and onwards: Icann’s decision to allow non-Latin web addresses will at a stroke shift the global balance of power to what we still call the developing world. The next question is: at what point will English cease to be the default global language? See Chapter Nine.

Euphemism corner

Some more words and phrases, taken from Shoot the Puppy, by Tony Thorne. Also see pp 167-174 of The Noughties.

aggressive records management: destroying incriminating documents
alumnized: dismissed, made redundant
assisted departure: see ‘alumnized’
change of reporting relationship: demotion
contingent commission: bribe
human sacrifice: see ‘assisted departure’
live ambient point-of-sale: confrontation between seller and customer
percussive maintenance: hitting a device to make it work

...unquote

A friend just described The Noughties as “academically conversational”. Then he admitted he’d only read the introduction. I quite like it, though. What phrase would you choose to sum up the book or the decade?