The Noughties

I was startled recently, while reading a Straits Times article about the proposed North-South expressway, to see the following sentence: "Several feasibility studies have been done on it, some dating back to the early noughties."

I remember hearing about "the aughts" as a possible term for the first decade of our present century, a usage apparently modelled on one popular in the early 20th century. But "the aughts" doesn't appear to have caught on. To me it sounds a little too WASP-y—it makes me think of boater hats and spatterdashers and vapid young men wearing Harold Lloyd glasses.   

But is "the noughties" really preferable? The Wikipedia article on the decade—entitled, by the way, "2000s (decade)"—claims that the BBC listed "noughties" as a "potential moniker for the new decade," and that the word has since become "the only term for the decade in common use in the UK." I guess this is why the Straits Times adopted it, out of some naive notion that if the English use it, it must be OK. Not so, I say!

The trouble with "the noughties" is that 1) nobody outside the UK uses "nought" very much, aside from a certain generation, now probably retired, of Convent-school math teacher; 2) the suffix -ties, derived from -ty in numerals like twenty and thirty and so on, can't be stuck on to nought because there is no such word or number as *noughty.

For me, "noughties" sounds too much like the tongue-in-cheek media catchphrase that it is. I don't know whether "in common use in the UK" means it has been adopted into stylesheets as standard usage—if so, that strikes me as remarkably tone-deaf.

I expect the beef against "early 2000s" is that some newspaper or press stylesheets direct their editors to spell out the decades, i.e. nineties and not  90s. The thought of using numerals for the one decade and not others must send a few people into copy-editing conniptions.

But that seems a lot less gauche to me than "noughties."