Today’s All Things Considered had a story about the division of opinion over how to refer to the name of next year Which is it, “two thousand ten” or “twenty ten”? One commenter said that “two thousand ten” is proper and polite; I think he went so far as to call it the “adult” thing to say. This gets right to the core debate about whether proper usage is vernacular — as spoken — or normative.

But, more important, the story did not address more vexing questions. First, what nickname will we use for 2010. 2009 was “oh nine”; will we say “one oh” or “oh ten” for short? For example, if you trade in your “oh five honda” for a new car, is it an “oh ten prius” or what?

And how will we refer to the decade to come in aggregate? This, it seems, has remained an unresolved issue with respect to the decade now ending: what came after the Nineties? The “oughts” or “noughts”? So are we heading into the “teens”? Does anyone know how people referred to the corresponding decades a century ago?

(And, no, I’m not going to beat a dead horse by mentioning that, of course, since there was no year zero, the decade does not really end for another year, until December 31, 2010. I thought we had put that one to rest a decade nine years ago at the turn of the century.)