Whose Calendar?

It's one thing to have a different faith (or no faith at all, which is kinda the same thing) than someone else. It's another to want to purge all traces, however indirect, of competing viewpoints. Like with the calendar, for instance.

Instead of B.C. ("Before Christ") and A.D ("Anno Domini" - In the year of our Lord") for dates, our betters now want us to switch and instead use their own new terminology: B.C.E. ("Before Common Era") and C.E. ("Common Era" itself). Thus, in the newspeak, it is currently 2004 C.E as I write this, rather than A.D. 2004, as it was before we knew better. They've already begun phrasing it this way themselves.

The further inconvenience of us actually using a calendar developed on the order of Pope Gregory XIII is presumably to be dealt with later, perhaps by noting that he, along with Shakespeare, was secretly a Muslim, or some such thing.

Me, I'll use B.C. and A.D. because I see no reason to change to the Communal Common Era system. But I still can't see how we can ignore or pretend not to understand when other people go C.E. on us; what to do? I'd hate to get into an argument every time a date came up. This was bothering me.

So I phoned the Dan Rather Research Agency for help, and learned something fascinating.

The term C.E. doesn't actually refer to Common Era at all. It stands for something completely different: Christ Eternal. That's why academia was happy to keep using a Christian Calendar! They were just pretending to change the meaning in order to placate their more radical members. But the essential meaning itself remains unchanged, as do the calendar's origins.

Just remember to pronounce it correctly when speaking.