Alphabet Soup

BC AD BCE CE PC

If I continue to post and you continue to read, I’m sure it will soon become obvious that I am not a fan of PC (“political correctness”), so I may as well just state that right now.

When I read literature in which the author alternates between “he” and “she” as the generic pronoun, I don’t get all warm and fuzzy inside thinking that my femininity has been respected; I just get annoyed. I’m a big girl, and I can take it that the male “he” is used as the gender-neutral-third-person-singular pronoun. Alternating pronouns just sounds stupid.

Another proliferating PC phenomena that I find annoying is the use of CE/BCE (“common era”/”before common era”) in place of BC/AD (“before Christ”/”Anno Domini” meaning “year of our Lord”). CE/BCE is supposed to be more sensitive because it eliminates Christ-related terms.

While this does accomplish the PC purpose as far as notation, it leaves the numeration just as centered on Christ as it ever was. The year 1 CE is the same as the year 1 AD, so has the notation change REALLY accomplished the intended purpose? (And why use the Latin letters B, C and E anyway? Isn’t that rather Eurocentric?)

For those who really want genuine change in this area, I have an idea. First, use Mayan rather than Latin letters. Mayans developed the most accurate calendar of any culture, so they rightfully deserve the honor. Second, shift the numeration so that “Year One” of the new system would have begun on Monday, August 27, 1883. An added PC bonus to this is that there could be a natural shift to considering Monday, rather than the Christian holy day Sunday, to be the first day of the week. Now we're talking REAL change!

Why August 27, 1883?

I’ll explain in a future post, but I want to give you a chance to have the satisfaction of figuring that out on your own first (no fair Googling it!).