Naming A Century

It cant, clearly, be called just the Twentieth century, since that brings up strong echoes of 20th Century Fox. One very sensible suggestion came from some students from the University of Edinburgh, who feel that we should call ourselves the Age of Post-fill-in-the-blanks. This century, after all, has seen modernism, post-modernism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, post-deconstructionism, and even liberalisation and post- liberalisation.

Others suggest some sort of spin on the ages of the past, such as the Age of Democracy, the Age of Rationalisation (which one gloomy wit sitting in Poland refined further to the Age of Rationing), the Post-Imperialist Age (see? Theres no getting away from a determined prefix) and suchlike. The more pessimistic have suggested the Age of Unreason, the Age of Heresy, the Age of Innocence Lost, the Age of the Atom Bomb and similar monickers. The over-optimistic are also present: somehow, I dont feel that a century that played host to Idi Amin, Adolf Hitler and Teddy Kennedy qualifies as the Age of Compassion.

 

It is, naturally, from the US that some of the more bizarre offerings spring. Would you be more comfortable knowing that you belonged to the Pre-World Republic Era, or that you had lived peacefully through the Doom of Man Years? Both suggestions emanated from an organisation that has devoted itself in all seriousness to the task of picking a monicker for the last 100 years (that is one of their most popular ones, by the way: The Last Hundred Years). Based in Denver, it bears the innocuous name of The Center for Popular Language. Their work is to collate and evaluate suggestions that come in. Unfortunately, since they havent done a very good job of popularising themselves (their web site, too, appears to be defunct), they are not apparently overwhelmed by suggestions. When I contacted them, suggestion number 173 had just come in: The Fortune Cookie Century.

As usual, the elements play a large part in this mother of all searches for a name. We just missed being the Age of Steel, and iron and stone have already been used, of course. But theres still the Age of Titanium, the Uranium Century, the Plastic Age (which occasionally masquerades as the Age of Plastics), and, in an unexpectedly euphonius entry, the Time of Teflon. Some entries here are slightly incomprehensible: the Kryptonite Age obviously came out of the bosom of a Superman fan, but the Bakelite Age? One of the best in this category, if you think about it, is the Age of Neon, which is what some editorialists and SF writers are already calling the century sneakily.

Perhaps we should just call it the Year of the Fruit Bat and get on with the next century.