You’ve heard of the Gay ’90s, the Roaring ’20s, the Nifty ’50s and the Swinging ’60s? If so, you might be puzzling over this Y2K conundrum: With only zeroes to guide them, how will tomorrow’s historians refer to the millennium’s very first decade?

A National Public Radio commentator recently tackled that question, noting that some decades are known by their strange-sounding monikers which speak volumes about the social mores, or lack thereof, of their points in time. Gilded Age culture, for example, made the 1890s “gay,” while bathtub gin and Al Capone’s chattering tommy guns put the “roar” into the 1920s.

Of course, before the decade to come is named — if it ever is — something has to happen that makes it distinctive, setting it apart from the 1990s.

School graduates departing their alma maters between the years 1900 and 1909 liked to say they graduated in “aught 7, aught 8, aught 9,” and so on, substituting the mysterious “aught” sound for the lone zero. Perhaps future generations will call young people living in the next decade the “Aught Generation,” or, if they plunge the world into war and financial chaos, the “Aught Not Generation.”

Or, how about the “Double 0” decade, or maybe the “0-0-No” years?

Whatever the outcome, it’s a relief to be worrying about something unrelated to the prospect of frantic people living on canned beans and sipping bottled Y2K water through straws inserted into gas masks. The millennium catastrophe, or non-catastrophe, is bearing down on the world; the comparatively innocent matter of naming the next 10 years should be a pleasant diversion.

Besides, this exercise in decade dubbing will give society a chance to set the record straight. All right-thinking people with a modest command of mathematics and a calendar know full well that the true epochal extravaganza should not be held until Jan. 1, 2001, yet the Third Millenium/21st Century champagne already is on ice. Perhaps, so future generations know we actually could count, history’s first 11-year decade should be called the “Just Couldn’t Waities.”