I was wandering about the Internet today and came across a series of photographs. The name for the online album was constructed this way:
Our New Home! Circa May 12, 2010
Um…no.
Circa, while a perfectly good and useful word (often abbreviated as c.), means, in the sense of dates, “around” or “about”. For example, we don’t know the exact years for the birth and death of Plato, so you might write “born c. 428 BC, died c. 348 BC”. If you know the exact date of something, then it isn’t circa anything, it is month-date-year, a fact and not an approximation or estimate.
Words are fun, and the English language has at least a million words to play with. But in this case, circa has no place on the playground – save it for times of uncertainty.
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