It’s time, people, for us to make a big decision. What in the heck is the name of this year we’re in?

How long are we going to go on referring to our year by its formal name, “two thousand ten”? After all, way back in the last century, I bet you never heard anybody say “one thousand nine hundred ninety nine,” when they were giving you the date, did you?

Of course not.

Naturally, during the “zeroes” or the “aughts,” we didn’t have to face this problem. Which was good, because we had lots of other problems that were more pressing: planes flying into the World Trade Center, for instance, plus an economic meltdown, a major hurricane, a tsunami, and a whole bunch of sex scandals.

Everybody was happy to just go around saying, “two thousand one,” “two thousand two,” and all the way up to “two thousand nine.”

But I think it’s time we rethink things. After all, the changeover to “twenty” has to happen sometime—surely we’re not going to be saying “two thousand ninety-nine”—and I say future generations would appreciate it if we’d just make the change right NOW and spare them the problem. They’re going to have their hands full with fixing the mess we’ve done to the planet, and the least we can do is pass down the best way of saying the year. They’ll thank us for it. I can just hear our great-grandchildren saying, “Well, it’s true that they pretty much destroyed all the rain forests and killed off the polar bears, but by God, they gave us the best darned way of thinking of the date.”

Besides, “twenty-ten” sort of has a nice, cool, compact ring to it. And just think, when we get to “twenty-twenty,” there can be all kinds of clever puns about perfect vision, and that will be fun.

Last night, listening to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, I did an informal study of how each of them referred to the new year, and I’m disappointed to say that these two trend-setters flipped back and forth, but mostly landed on saying “two thousand ten.” That’s to be expected, I suppose, as we, as a culture, learn to wrap our tongues around this whole new way of saying the date.

But today at Starbucks, a whole group of people waiting at the counter to pay for their coffees got into a major discussion of this problem, and the view was resoundingly unanimous: TWENTY-TEN IT IS.

The People have spoken.

So how many times have you said the name of the year so far? And what are you calling it?