I just ran across a bit of vernacular that I was previously unfamiliar with. Maybe I’ll sound like a rube, but I’d never heard of C.E. For you fellow rubes, C.E. means “Common Era,” and is a substitute for A.D. — as in, it’s currently the year 2008 C.E. Common Era’s counterpart to B.C. is B.C.E. (Before the Common Era).

At first I figured that C.E. was a fairly recent term developed by secularists and non-Christians in the interests of political correctness. But then I did a little research and found out that Common Era dates as early as 1615 by European Christians. How does that square? Still, C.E. as used in contemporary culture still has the whiff of overly conscious political correctness.

Just in case you’ve forgotten, B.C. stands for “Before Christ,” and A.D. means “Anno Domini” (In the Year of Our Lord).

I’m all for a pliable lexicon, but C.E. doesn’t seem to have taken off. It’s been 400 years, after all. Then again, maybe I’m just a myopic American. Anyway, I’m not switching to C.E. any time soon.

There’s also an issue that nags at me. Why, if de-Christianizing the calendar is at least part of the rationale for C.E., does it use the exact same dates on the Christian-based Gregorian calendar?

Why not go further and designate the Common Era as after The Great Plague, or after the Buick?

C.E. is just swapping acronyms, which sound to me like unnecessary P.C.

This article appears in May 21-27, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...