B Bad, badly.Bad is an adjective and can therefore only modify nouns;badly is an adverb that modi es only verbs: This really is a bad manuscript, but I feel badly about its rejection See modifier. Badly. See bad. B.C., B.C.E. These abbreviations stand for before Christ and before the common era and they refer to the time before the birth of Christ. They are added to dates to distinguish where the dates fall in the commonly accepted Western dating system. These abbreviations are usually not spelled out, follow the whole date, and appear in capital letters with periods. Using lower case or dropping the periods is acceptable in many stylesand less formal writing, though A.D. (“anno Domini” or after Christ), B.C., and B.C.E. usually appear in more formal works, where the standard rule should be followed. See capitalization. In many Western cultures, years are counted forward from the birth of Christ to the present (AD. 1989 was four years ago, while years are counted in reverse order back from that date into so-called prehistory (“426 BC. is a later date than BC. but comes before AD. 426”). Of course, non-Western cultures don’t all see time this way, and even many Western cultures use alternate systems. Jews (or at least some Israelis) use the Hebrew calendar that sets the beginning of time at the Creation, which took place, in their view, about 5,500 years ago. Some people prefer not to date time from the birth of Christ but accept the commonest Western dating system by adding CE. and B.C.E. (after the common era or before it) to dates.
