I find it interesting that when someone refers to “The Twenties”, they are more likely to be referring to the 1920s than our current decade. Since we never came up with a catchy word for the past two decades, did we just get out of the habit of naming our decades?
Over on Bored Panda, I saw someone call the 2020s “the roaring WTFs”. Works for me.
I suggest “The Fascist 20’s” because there is such a right wing push not only in the U.S. but in other places like Germany.
I’m not so sure that’s a distinguishing factor between the 1920s and the 2020s.
It’s going to get more confusing in a few years when the second Great Depression starts. GDII, the Big One.
True, but the Roaring 20s were a lot more fun. The serious Fascism came home to roost in the 1930s. Here in the 2020s, we seem to be running ahead of that schedule.
We haven’t given a decade a nickname that stuck since the Swinging Sixties. It’s not really something we do anymore. It only took F. Scott Fitzgerald two years to coin “Roaring Twenties” in 1922.
Now that I think of it, the 1920s and 1960s are probably the only decades you could get anything like a consensus for a nickname.
The Dirty Thirties was common in Canada, but I’m not sure it resonates today.
When we elected Biden in 2020, I was hoping this decade would go down as the “Boring Twenties”, Alas, that damned Chinese curse.
While recent decades haven’t quite earned nicknames as iconic as the “Roaring Twenties” or the “Swinging Sixties,” we did manage to get the “Disco” (or “Hangover”) Seventies, the “Big Hair” Eighties, and the “Dot-Com” Nineties. But when it comes to the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s? Nothing’s really stuck… yet. Maybe it’s time to fix that:
- The Awkward Aughts (2000s) – A decade that never quite found its footing. Between the Y2K panic, questionable fashion choices (hello, low-rise jeans and bedazzled everything), and the rise of reality TV, it always felt like we were figuring things out as we went.
- The Selfie Teens (2010s) – Social media took over, and suddenly, we all had thousands of pictures of our own faces. Instagram influencers, and the golden age of meme culture—digital self-obsession.
- The Quarantine 20s (2020s) – So far, this decade has been defined by lockdowns and Zoom calls in pajamas, thanks to Covid.
Here’s hoping we can rebrand before the ’30s roll in.
A small band of survivors laboriously carved “The big meteor 20s” into a sandstone rock face before they starved. 500 years later a basalt lava flood buried that rock face, never to be seen by sentient beings.
… except for that scrappy band of house cats that managed to survive the bolide impact by tunneling deep into the Earth—an act of desperation that led, over countless eons, to their evolution into sentient beings. Armed with newly acquired opposable thumbs (each claw honed to a perfect point), they eventually emerged to claw away the lava-encrusted rock face and uncover the lost world message. Their feline archaeologist leader, whiskers quivering with contempt, declared, “Dumb humans! Didn’t they know enough to burrow when they saw that giant rock plummeting toward Earth?!”
I’m starting to think sentience is overrated.
a.k.a. the “Me Decade”