Regarding Oversensitivity

This will be short (ish).

I’m doing a bit of rejiggering on some historical math in my next novel and noticed I was using BC and AD insead of the recommended BCE and CE. I asked myself, should I change this?

I decided not to. It’s what I grew up with, pretty much everyone knows what you mean, and the switch was not so much for accuracy, but to de-Christianize them and make them more inclusive. I get it. I do. I’m Jewish. Our calendar starts WAAAAY back. But here’s the thing, they’re the way I think, the way almost everyone I know thinks, and I think they’re actually clearer to a Western audience.

“But what if someone gets offended?”

If you are so offended by me using BC/AD instead of BCE/CE that it ruins even a second of your life, you are up your own ass and your priorities are megalomaniacal.

I’m not deadnaming a trans person or refusing to use their pronouns. I’m not using a racial epithet. I’m just using terms that have been common to my culture for millennia and which are just a cosmetic plaster over the exact same date ranges. 1 BCE is 1 BC. 1 AD is 1 CE. As far as I’m concerned it’s not some existential issue of fairness and respect. It’s basically the difference between metric and imperial. I still use pounds, feet, miles too. Am I being insensitive to Belgians if I don’t use meters, kilograms, and liters? Should I care if Belgians have issues with my use of imperial measures?

Okay, Jean Claude Van Damme is Belgian (“the muscles from Brussels”), and he’s still in decent shape, so he might try to kick my ass on behalf of all Belgians. And if he wants to, come at me bro.