MMeM, S17E4 – What century is this again?

It’s not that I go looking for things that annoy me, but here’s one. I really dislike it when movies, books, and TV shows rapidly refer to historical periods by centuries, i.e. “In the 18th century”. When I hear that I immediately have to do an internal timeline in my brain that tells me, “what they are talking about is the 1700’s”.

You know why they do that don’t you? To take a great joke from a disgraced comedian, they do it because the Christians won. The entire world operates on a Christian calendar. But I have a problem with this too, because to say the 1700’s are the 18th century is effectively saying that there was only 1 century before Christ?

Not only that, but we’re to count that century backwards and stuff? People have counted further back than 100 years but we don’t add that to the total count I guess because it’s negative. We’ve counted enough backwards to effectively be at year zero all the time.

And I’m done.