TWENTY-OH WHAT?
Musings on Time and its Measurement

15 April 2014 AD

It’s far too late to do anything about it now, but during the past decade I found myself in a etymological back-water, excluded from the common parlance; an outcast, tragically misunderstood. 

My mistake was to suppose that when the year 2001 dawned, it would be appropriate to use the same convention in place for the past Five Centuries if not longer, and call the year Twenty-O-One.  It just seemed to make sense. When did TR assume the Presidency? Nineteen-Oh-One. When was the dwarf planet Ceres discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi? Eighteen-Oh-One. When was Captain Kidd hanged as a pirate? Seventeen-Oh-One. And so it goes on down the corridors of recorded time and honored tradition. “Twenty-Oh-Something” should have been a natural when its time finally came. Waiting in the wings, eager to flex millennial muscles, it would not only be timely, it would be ubercool.  When I was in school, anyone who said: “One Thousand Nine-Hundred and Eighty Nine” was either on heavy drugs or recently arrived from Kalashnipur, Lower Baluchistan. 

But it never happened. The stranglehold the talking heads had on our collective psyche proved Herculean. In SONY and Fox and NBC boardrooms it was decided and so decreed: The awesomeness of pronouncing: “THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND SOMETHING SOMETHING” in Magnificent Ten-Syllable Tones was undeniable.  It would be Policy.  Deviation therefrom would be the exclusive province of hoary pundits like Dan Rather in an oppositional/defiant mood.  It was, after all, The Third Millenium.  Any reference to twenny-oh anything would be met by confused looks and then the slow, slow dawning of understanding.  It was a battle not worth fighting.

Still, from my perspective, since the first 14 years of the long-awaited Third Millenium have proven among the bloodiest and cruelest in human history we might as well skip the histrionics. Personally, when referencing a given mass-murder, species extinction or genocide which took place in say, 2007, I still recommend avoiding the bloated pomposity of using 6 ponderous syllables when “twenny-o-sevn” does the job admirably with just 3.

Regarding the other Time issue...now filtering in from the province of Archeology...about the appropriateness of the term "B.C."  I don't have problems with the retention of antique terminology whether appropriate or not.  Antique terminology gives our culture charm and tradition. There is no need for computer programs to suddenly be called "apps" just to sound cool. Jews don't have to call a Christmas Tree a Hanukkah Bush to avoid apostasy. It's OK to refer to a freezer as an icebox. I wouldn't even balk at someone calling a CD-player a victrola. It gives us some continuity rooted in the past. 

B.C. however was always a little weird since it was English whilst AD was Latin, but never mind that.  When thoughtful archaeologists, striving to do good, changed it to B.C.E. (before Christian Era) they unwittingly implied that the Christian Era was the only one worth establishing as a boat-anchor for Time.  The next iteration kept B.C.E. but changed its meaning to "Before Common Era" which in a way was even worse because it directly implied that all other Eras were either Uncommon or by inference, Abnormal.  Thus, Buddhists are left with the suggestion that the saintly Siddharta Gautama attained parinibbana not in the Blessed Year 1, but in the year Negative 545 of the Abnormal Era. 

My suggestion is that we return to B.C. but change AD to A.C. (and add the periods for uniformity). However, since this gives an air of presumptive and arrogant English Chauvinism, how about we keep AD and start referring to the Year Zero on back as AnDi (ANte DominI)?  Things are consistent, the language is the same used during the epoch we are fretting about and everybody is happy.