The question of the week comes from reader Frank Marcheluzzo. "This decade is almost over and I am very concerned that I don't know what to call it," he writes. "The Zeroes? The Oughts? The Naughts? The 2000s? The two thousand-ties? The Oh-Ohs? Ugh, I don't like any of them."

Frank is right. We have 10 years' worth of cultural and historical references to store, but have yet to label the box in which to put them. Almost at the end, we still haven't decided what to call this decade. Or the next one, for that matter. The Seventies, Eighties, Nineties and then ...

We started out by dodging the question, and just referred to this as the New Millennium until the promising era that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall lasted until, oh, Sept. 11, 2001, after which fences went up as fast as people could build them. Some talk of the "turn of the century," but usually that refers to the 20th, not the 21st.

Me, I favour the Oughts, if only because it conjures up images of men called Pappy who wear Confederate cavalry hats sideways, smoke corncob pipes and whittle their own wooden legs.

"That storm warn't nothin'," they cackle. "You should have seen the winter of ought-eight." They also use words like "tarnation" and "dagnabbity."

A decade need not fit neatly between chronological bookends. The Fifties, with their American Graffiti crewcuts and swimming pool-sized Chevies, lasted until 1964.

The Sixties of Vietnam and Woodstock lasted until the shag haircuts and disco balls of the mid-1970s. The Me Decade of the 1970s has yet to end.

Ideally, the name should reflect the tenor of the times: The Roaring Twenties, the Dirty Thirties, the Psychedelic Sixties. Maybe these past 10 years should be the Ought Nots, as in the decade that ought not to have happened: 9/11, Iraq and the War on Rational Response. Global warming, hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami. The dot.com bubble, Enron and the economic meltdown. Reality TV. Sarah Palin. The ShamWow guy.

This decade began with the crushing disappointment of Y2K, the global computer meltdown that not only failed to happen but, as I have mentioned before, left me hunkered in the backyard bunker with a deer rifle, a six-year supply of Spam and a $40,000 Visa bill I didn't think I would have to pay.

Now the Ought Nots are ending with everyone plugged in and tuned out, ear buds and handhelds making us deaf and blind to anything that sits more than eight inches beyond our noses.

Not that we can complain about the greatest legacy of the decade: the communication revolution. Wikipedia was born in 2001, the BlackBerry smartphone was released in 2002 and iTunes debuted in 2003. Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004. YouTube, the procrastinator's friend, arrived in 2006, the same year as Twitter.

You now own a television that's bigger than your dining room table but need a 15-year-old to help you reprogram it after the power goes out. Every song you love can be stored on a device as small as a communion wafer. Awesome stuff.

Perhaps we ought not be too hasty to write off the Ought Nots. Any decade in which Conrad Black, Paris Hilton and Martha Stewart go to jail can't be all bad. Sure, we had Osama, but we also had Obama. The Ought Nots brought us hybrid cars, the artificial liver, flash mobs and the dashboard GPS, which must have cut the divorce rate by a good 15 per cent.

Which finally brings us to the point: What do you think were the best things about the past 10 years? What are the memories that will stay with you?

I want to hear what people think made this decade remarkable.

Send in your thoughts and you'll be eligible for fabulous prizes, or at least mediocre ones, including my treasured George Bush Dumbass Head On A String air freshener, which remains unopened on my desk.

Please submit your entries to me at jknox@tc.canwest.com or the Times Colonist, 2621 Douglas St., Victoria, B.C. by Dec. 7. Readers' responses will be published Dec. 27.

We might not have a name for the past decade, but it still Ought Not to be forgotten.