So here we are, two years left to go in the decade (or three, depending on how strict you are about these things), and we still don’t have a name for it.

Think of how easily “the seventies” trips off the tongue when talking about disco and leisure suits, or “the eighties” when the topic turns to spiky haircuts and A Flock of Seagulls.

But how will our future selves refer to the current decade?

There was a lot of talk about what to call the first decade of the new millennium back in 2000 – perhaps the “oh-ohs,” “the aughts,” “the noughts” or the “zero-zeros.” At the time, John Morris, president of Merriam-Webster, said that the start of the 20th century was called “the nineteen-hundreds,” and predicted that this decade would be called “the two-thousands.”

All the suggested candidates for names have been no-shows, and nothing else has emerged as the prevailing term. For now, it doesn’t seem so urgent. When discussing this decade, “now” still suffices. But in a few years, we won’t have that option.

“It’s an interesting phenomenon,” said Joe Pickett, an editor of the American Heritage Dictionary. “It’s a case where you’d think there’d be a really pressing need for a word.”