PM and AM

Ante Meridiem ~ any time before noon.

And PM stands for Post meridiem.

"ante" means before or in front, but in this case, it means before.

"Meridiem" means midday, so ante meridiem means before midday.

"post" means after or behind, but in this case, it means after.
Post meridiem means after midday.

Heeeey, owen. You drew Rae out. Way to go!

So AM is from 0:00 to 12:00, and PM is from 12:00 (or 12:01) to 24:00 (or 0:00?)

A.M. = Ante meridiem

From Latin ante, before + meridiem, accusative of meridiês, noon.


However, P.M. stands for Post meridiem

Welcome to A2K, Douglas! I hope that you enjoy things here.

Well, people have adapted it so that AM is from 0000 to to 1159, and 1200 to 2359 are PM.

Once the clock has struck the hour/minute/second of 12 noon it is official post meridiem- after midday. Thus when it is 12.00, unless it is the exact instant on which the clock changes, it is officially after noon.

And welcome douglas.

And P & O stands for Peninsular and Oriental.

Not a lot of people know that.

Well, a lot of people probably do know that, but compared to the ones who do not know that, relatively few.

BTW there should be a thread for latin abbreviations, so that smartarses can show off: i.e., q.v., q.e.d. There probably is, come to think of it, or am I thinking of Abuzz?

Put et. al. on the list

McTag- Ipso facto!!!!

Why is BC in english, but AD in latin? I have no idea, myself.

I don't know, McTag, but I will try to find out. I guess that it just stuck. They're trying to do away with BC and AD, now, by replacing them with 'BCE' and 'CE'-- before the common era, and common era.

That's just silly. What common era?

I'm not really sure but I think Drom may be right about it just sticking. Somewhere along the line someone decided that the calendar should be dated from the birth of Christ and so from then on people who had cause to would refer to the year as 'the year of our Lord' or anno Domini (so this year would be anno Domini, 2004). Later on down the line someone decided that, as the calendar was set up that way, they were going to talk about anything before the counting of years by the Christian method as 'everthing before Christ', so we got 'Before Christ' or B.C. And as the years since were already referred to as anno Domini that just got abbreviated to A.D.

But it's all screwed up anyway, since they got date of Christ's birth wrong.

CN used to be used instead of BC, I've found out, and it slipped partly due to people's thinking that AD meant 'after death,' leading to the creation of an English abbreviation.

Common era I can't understand. It's just a PC way of saying 'Christian era.' They are changing it because they find that non-Christian people are annoyed that the whole of time is mapped around Jesus. But isn't calling Christians 'common' also offensive ?

So, AD = anno Domini = CE = common era, BC = Before Christ = before the common era = CN

What is CN?

CN means 'Credit note,' doesn't it?

Or Common Name/Customer Name?

(In Latin textes, CN. means Cnaeus.)

Yeah, Walter, both of those are right too. What does either 'credit note' or 'common name' have to do with dates? Did you see this as a date, Lainchance?