Stupidity Showcase/My Internet Adventure

[Wildeblood]

Because [reasons], I viewed a random website today. It was in the old-fashioned, article/comments format. ("Blog" format. Sorry, often the terminology evades me. Anyway, it pre-dated the modern infinite-scroll format.) ...Anyway... I think the reason blog-style died out was because allowing comments from random site visitors was an efficient way to get people to showcase their stupidity. I don't recall ever reading/viewing/browsing such a website and not seeing something stupid being said. Any-anyway, because I'm in an over-sharing mood, I will shareth here below the comment that hath offended me.

The website is apparently of a Spanish tourism operator, who/that/which specializes in visiting archaeological sites.

The article purports to explain the meanings of B.P. and other date-related abbreviations.

The fact, for anyone reading who is unaware, is that B.P. is an abbreviation for "Before Present" (epoch A.D. 1950), used in archaeological contexts, particularly radio-carbon dating.

The comments contain the expected atheist sanctimony complaining about the starting year of the Gregorian calendar. Then someone asked the meaning of c. before a date, which led to this most recent contribution:

Carmen Sims
23/08/2024 at 14:26
It’s a matter of technical interpretation. All I really know is that the word “circa” best describes a time and place of anything spawned by human activity . When I was young, I thought everything said by scientists is true. Now, when I am old, I know better and I base my research starting from a circa time.

This hath offended me because I would place "circa" in the category of primary school vocabulary, i.e. words I had learnt by age 12. Perhaps I'm mis-remembering, I do that frequently.

Nevertheless and moreover, assuming one has reached the status of "when I am old", as this commenter claims, and somehow avoided the word "circa", which is plausible, the meaning of this particular word should fall firmly in the category of TTAFO - things that are obvious:-
circa => circle => round => around.

Or, as a respondent commenter hath explained:

Killian Driscoll
23/08/2024 at 15:36
“Circa” means approximately. It does not refer to human activity.

Myself, I always read "c." as "around", not "approximately" or "circa", but hey, that's just my preference. In any case, I've been a proponent of dead-internet theory since before the term "dead internet theory" was coined, so am happy to believe that Carmen was just a passing chatbot, and no-one is really that dumb.

Sigh-ning off now.
https://www.artobatours.com/articles/ar ... -cal-mean/