As a non-religious person, I applaud the renaming of various things which once had religious significance. Until last year, “Christmas” in my house involved singing hymns, praying, nailing ourselves to crosses and drinking the blood of bats.  Now, with the invention of the new “holiday yuletide snow fun” period, the event has been completely transformed. We buy a tree, give each other gifts – and this year we didn’t even sacrifice anyone!

I’m equally pleased about the abandoning of the archaic term “AD” (“Anno Domini” – in the year of our Lord) in favour of “CE” (“Common Era”). Previously, every time I wrote down the date I was caught up in a terrible misery over the death of Jesus, the son whom I doubt existed of a god I don’t believe in. As I write dates quite regularly for my job, this was causing me a lot of anguish and I’m very pleased it’s being painstakingly stamped out.

My only complaint is that these changes don’t go far enough. The next things to approach are:

• The word “enthusiast“, as I’m sure you know, means a person possessed by a god. This is out of touch with modern reality. We should use “fan” instead.
• The term “OMG” currently stands for “oh my god”. Do we all live in the fourth century now? Let’s stop this nonsense and make it stand for “oh my goodness” instead.
• Somehow the term “milky way” and its Greek equivalent, “galaxy“, continue to see regular use. We need to stamp this out – although we can’t be sure of exactly where the galaxy came from, we can be confident that it did not come from breast milk sprayed into the sky after Zeus’ baby son woke up during feeding. I recommend we use “distinct universe area”.
• I don’t believe in the Norse god of strength, Thor, and every Thursday this riles me up into a frenzy. I propose we rename “Thursday” to “Beyonceday” to reflect more current thinking.

These are quite common terms, so making the necessary changes will no doubt take a while. Rewriting the history books will probably be the most time-consuming part, but I think we can all agree that it will be a useful investment.