Student penalized for using word ‘man’ on his essay

originally posted by: OccamsRazor04

originally posted by: SprocketUK
a reply to: OccamsRazor04

The way I see it is if we changed tomorrow, 1917 would be 100 BCE. 1017 would be 1000 BCE and 1000 years before the birth of Jesus would simply be 3017 BCE, and everything else would be a CE date going forward.


Much simpler.

So changing every single date is simpler than changing nothing? I don't know how that is possible.

Because it's easier to work out how long ago something was. Using your BC, AD and AT scheme, you have to actually do the maths, 1000 BC is 3017 BT, but what about in a couple of thousand years? Right now, we can write 1970 and EVERYONE knows we mean 47 years ago, but you could have a 1970 BC, a 1970AD and a 1970 AT...What a pain!

If we changed tomorrow cos someone invents a warp drive, it'll be a bit of an adjustment for you and I, but all the children in the world up to say, 10 years old will just shrug and get on with it. in 50 years no one will care.

originally posted by: SprocketUK
Because it's easier to work out how long ago something was. Using your BC, AD and AT scheme, you have to actually do the maths,

No, there is no maths. You have to do the maths if you change it though.

You read a book that talks about events in AD 1930, now you have to figure out what the heck that actually means because this whole AD thing and 1930 don't exist any more, it's not even taught.

a reply to: OccamsRazor04

Ok, to use your system, how long between the battle of Marathon and, say, the US declaration of independence?

490BC/E and 1776AD/CE 2266 years, right?


now, to go a stage further, if we have a third date range, you have to add the entire AD date range to the BC one and then add all the third date range up to the particular date you are interested in.
Say there is a year zero in, 2049AD/CE From then on we measure the years in AT (After thing) and The US elects it's first openly gay president in.....178AT


How long between the battle of Marathon and this date? Its more complex than simply having Before thing and After thing, because you can say that the battle of Marathon is (490+2048 years BT or, more neatly, 2538BT (Because we count back continuously without an artificial break for year 1 AD/CE)and if you add that to the 178 years AT you can do the simple sum of 2538 +178=2716 years). by only having one before and one after category it is much easier. Adding silly things like prophets births, gods births etc just means we have to do more maths, rather analogous to when people measured the years in dynasties...5th year of the 22nd king's reign for example....it just gets clunky. There is no reason at all to keep the supposed date of the birth of Jesus if we reset the calendar due to some global "thing" that is of sufficient importance for us to reset.

Whether we say BC or BCE at the moment has no bearing whatsoever upon how difficult it can be to work out dates, it is just a convention we use due to the Roman occupation of much of the known world at one time, that's all.

Like I said earlier, if you go to learn about a subject, you are beholden to use the terminology you are taught, unless you want to drop silly marks.

You wouldn't expect to gain a mark in Chemistry for writing Moll instead of Mole, would you?