While walking out of 7-Eleven yesterday, I had the distinct pleasure of holding the door open for a guy in his 50s wearing my new favorite t-shirt. It was a basic black shirt* with the following text printed on it:

cleverly disguised as a responsible adult

[*Now that I reflect on it, wearing a black shirt this week is pretty psychotic—we’re in the middle of a nasty (for us) heat wave…]

…

Holy smokes. I had heard this decade referred to as the noughts (though we spelled it naughts, perhaps incorrectly) back in the late ’90s. What I didn’t put together, until I read it today**, is that we could also refer to this decade as the noughties. [**Yes, that’s the kind of thing I read for “fun.” I need to get out more.]

Proof of how old I am: when I was yearbook editor, we made the call to use the term “naughts” in the yearbook based on the word of exactly one writer on staff—without any verification that it was actually correct. While we had internet access back then, it was mostly used for email and idle entertainment. (In this golden age, there was no spam (!); the closest you would get would be your friends being asses.) There was no Wikipedia to do any sort of spot-check. There was no Google. My favorite search engine, back then, was AltaVista.

I sound old to myself.

I’m still blown away at how the internet has changed from a curiosity into a major facet of everyday life in under a decade. I have a hard time remembering(/imagining) life without it, now, but it wasn’t that long ago…