If you want to reference a calendar to the Space Age, I suggest AS, for After Sputnik.
Small (sorry) nitpick: Dennis the Short, i.e. Dionysius Exiguus.
Even there, there may be variations. I’ve seen dates in the format 5 SEP 2013 and also 05 SEP 2013.
This link, from Yahoo Answers, gives two other formats!
That’s exactly what we do. Nobody is going to arrest you for using BC and AD, but if someone insists on using it when he knows his audience contains non-Christians, then some people may be offended. He has the right to consider them overly sensitive or PC, and they have the right to consider him a dick.
:smack:
thinks fast
Well, if the man can’t even get the date of the birth of the Son of God right, I’m not gonna bother to get his name right.
It wasn’t until after 731 that the calendar of Dennis the Dwarf became dominant, and the Franks adopted it only a few years before Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the Romans.
Since that dating scheme was still very new, I’ve wondered if some monk didn’t come forth and say “the year is a little off, why don’t we fix it now before it becomes an ineradicable legacy?” Charlemagne answered “Nah. Being crowned on Christmas Day, 800 AD exactly seems kind of cool.”
BCE/CE is unnecessarily PC, in that it solves a minor problem and introduces bigger ones. The main problem is: when you’re scanning through a document with lots of dates, the very different BC and AD pop out more. The BCE/CE distinction requires you to recognize the presence/absence of one letter, and the other two are extraneous.
If you hate the religious aspect that much, then at least you can make jokes that “Dominus” is what Roman slaves called their masters.
You have a cite for that? I thought BP meant Before Present.
Put me in the “call when they bitch about days of the week” and the “unnecessarily PC” clubs.
It does mean Before Present.
However the practical meaning is "before 1950-01-01".
I use CE/BCE and accept that it is a far from perfect compromise. But in reality we can’t realistically be expected to recalculate every European history book.
And don’t get me started on Greenwich Mean Time.
Is it? To me it seems less common than when I was in college back in the 1980’s and '90’s. Confirmation bias on my part or yours, I wonder?
I don’t think dishonest is the right word. But speaking as an atheist, I sorta agree. I used to use the terms because they were ubiquitous when I was studying biology ( but not when I was studying history ), but I don’t often bother anymore. Just another historical artifact that has no particular import to me, like Thursday being named after Thor.
As a secularist, I can’t shake the feeling that BCE/CE is less politically correct than BC/AD.
I don’t at all mind using BC/AD out of sheer inertia; March and Wednesday have already been referenced upthread. On the other hand, using BCE/CE is more conscious of how we name years, and takes the exact opposite stand that I agree with: Slap a new coat of paint on it and say, “This Jesus-centric way of reckoning years is important to everybody.”. If anything, that’s a lot more Christian-centric than the aforementioned inertia.
Now, I wouldn’t terribly mind switching to a new calendar, but I wouldn’t want to spend any political capital on the matter. Plus it would be a pain in the ass. But if we were to adopt a new event for a year 0 (or year 1 if anyone can make a good argument for doing it that way again), I’d like to nominate the first voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World (Note that I don’t use the word “discover” or celebrate the event in any way; I nominate the event because it was world-changing).
More?
If talking about political correctness, that opens up a whole can of PC worms, although I agree that it was significant in some way, if not necessarily a dividing line.
I prefer CE because I know how to spell it out, unlike AD which I have difficulty remembering what it is abbreviating.
Render unto Caesar. If you don’t like BC and AD, start your own calendar instead of one that’s named after a Pope and see if you can get people to go along with it. I don’t sit here on my ass whining about pagan days of the week and months of the year, do I? Just quit your bitching already and pick something worthwhile to moan about.
Well a lot of books I saw using CE and BCE are probably from the '90s.
I do agree with the OP that our calendar is based around the birth of Jesus no matter how you change the words - the foundation remains the same, even with ‘human error’ aspect that has crept in. If is it appropriate to have a calendar based on this is another argument altogether. Simply changing the words (or letters) doesn’t change that. It may however make some people ‘feel’ more comfortable and increase it’s universality.
What would be needed is a new calendar system, such as something along the lines of the Startrek stardate system (which we might switch to in honor of Jesus’s second coming 
:smack: )
Peace
Exactly. We should start counting years from the date God created Adam. That’s the only logical starting point!
Or the year before, anyway.
“Crept in”? The “human error” was there at the very beginning! Dennis was off by around 4 years from the outset. The adjustments needed dated from well before the purported date of Jesus’ birth, as well, from the Julian calendar (which was, after all, purportedly created by Julius Caesar 40 or so years prior to the birth of Jesus).
It’s ALL human error because the whole thing was created by humans. That the system is named and based on the purported date of the birth of the purported son of God doesn’t lend it any sort of divine nature.