Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Word Game/Head Game

I was reading an article by Brian Bethune in Maclean's today, which had the sub-headline, "The newest view of Christ - activist, politician, not very Christian - is hard to square with the Bible's. Now some believers even say the faith might be better off without him."

I'm not surprised to see that kind of stuff these days. Over the past two decades, we have been in a terrible hurry to remove all memory of Jesus Christ from the culture's language.

Again, I am not a religious person. But again, I think this swift dismantling of one of the cornerstones of Western culture is very shortsighted. (The very fact that I just felt a need to write those two sentences should speak volumes, huh? I wrote them without thinking, because I wanted you to read more without seeing me as a nutcase. Sometimes, I even amuse myself at how evolved I'm becoming -- don't you?)

In the Maclean's article, I found the term: 70 CE. I knew it had to be an abbreviation of something, probably a reference to when the second temple of Jerusalem got knocked down in 70 BC. So I went looking and found that CE is the new term for AD.

Common Era (more or less the Gregorian Calendar we use today), as opposed to Anno Domini (the year of our Lord). In my university days, the erasure of Christianity was still in its infancy. The profs tried to sell us on BP (Before Present), but that made you do math while hungover and writing term papers, so it didn't catch on. BCE and CE have a better shot this time around.

You'd better get used to CE, because if it's appearing in magazines without a footnote to translation, then it means it's already on the way to becoming part of the language. BCE (Before the Common Era), by the way, is what is replacing BC (Before Christ).

"Common" is an apt description of our increasingly bland world of Equality Through Sameness, though it is a bit hackneyed. "BC" and "AD" have been the "common" way of looking at things for ages, for Jews and gentiles alike. But that isn't the point: the point is to specifically remove the Christ element from the abbreviation.

If you don't think that is the purpose of the change, let me pose an example. Let's say a child asks you why some old book says AD, while a newer book says BCE. You tell the child that the term was changed some years ago. Then the child asks you why it was changed. And you say...?

Make no mistake, the changing of words is a conscious decision to influence the change of thought. If a word is changed, then the previous word must have been "bad," while the word replacing it must be "better." If that's the case, then the ideas behind those words must be taken into account, and judged "good" or "bad" accordingly.

Eradicating and changing words is the simplest way to destroy someone's ability to think, argue, or remember. As Orwell pointed out, if someone cannot say something, then they cannot think it. It has a wonderful simplicity to it, or as one of his characters says, "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."

Remove Christ from the Bible, and Christ from the calendar. Pretty soon it's, "Who's Christ?"

2 comments:

JB said...

I completely recall the 'before present' profs at school. I have never heard the CE and BCE annotation and when I first read your piece my first instinct was to think of corporations that use that annotation (CE - Celanese, BCE - Bell Corp).

This was not the first time I had this problem. I remember thinking to myself at the local grocery store what the hell does General Motors have to do with the carrots and garlic that I am buying?? I soon realized that non-GM foods actually referred to Genetically Modified foods.

Sean said...

Now that you mention it, I guess BP could have been British Petroleum.