AD or A.D.?

Janice asks:
Has abbreviating A.D. and B.C. changed with usage as other abbreviations have?

In more ways than you think! The Canadian Press Stylebook, which is a pretty reliable guide, suggests that we drop the periods from all-capitals abbreviations unless they are geographical or refer to individual persons.

So we should drop the periods from AD (Anno Domini, year of our Lord), and BC (Before Christ), but keep them in B.C. (British Columbia).

Doing that, however, ignores the tendency to drop periods from all commonly used abbreviations. CP Style tells us to write L.A. and U.S.A., but most of us would write LA and USA...it's quicker! I'm as lazy as anyone, so I prefer naming my home province as BC. I even drop the periods out of my own initials!

An interesting trend has developed in the last 15 or 20 years, perhaps because so many English speakers and writers are now non-Christian. If you're a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Hindu, "year of our Lord" is someone else's expression. Dating the calendar from the birth of Christ seems arbitrary.

Still, the Christian calendar is what the world uses. So a popular alternative is to write 1250 CE or 1000 BCE: "Common Era" and "Before the Common Era." Archaeologists and others who deal in very long periods of time will often write "12,000 BP"—before the present, which they define as the year 2000.

Comments

[Haemi]

I actually like using BCE and CE rather than BC and AD -- but when speaking, the initials BC and AD just roll off your tongue, while BCE and CE are kind of difficult to properly pronounce!