One of my Twitter followers (I can’t bring myself to refer to them as tweeps in public, sorry) emailed me with a question about the proper use of the Latin abbreviation “ca.” It seems she’d worked with an author who claimed he had never encountered it before despite being “someone with a graduate degree, [who has] written thousands of papers, read 100s of books.”

Forgive my incredulity, but all right; he says he’s never seen it.

I’ve seen it plenty and I don’t have a graduate degree. I see it in periodicals like National Geographic and Smithsonian. I see it in resources like encyclopedias. I see it all over.

But in any case, here’s the deal. Continue reading “It’s a Circa Circus” →