dates; money bin coins

[Wilmer Rivers]

Don Rosa writes:
> So you say that in Ireland in the 6th century they wouldn't be using
> so-many-years-AD to denote the year? Ouch -- that's bad. Please check
> on that so when this story is reprinted in America I can make
> corrections, as I did with "tGotLL".

Does anyone know for certain whether this is true?  Anyway, it's always
fun when an author deliberately introduces an anachronysm based on the
use of the modern-day scheme of numbering the years. For instance,
sometimes for a gag a cartoonist will show a Roman coin bearing the
date 50 B.C. (as if they would know!), and in "A Funny Thing Happened
on the Way to the Forum" a Roman slave is shopping for wine and asks,
"Was 1 a good year?"  If you do want to be a stickler for accuracy,
however, make sure that no one denotes any date by "so-many-years-AD".
The correct way is "AD-so-many-years".  That is, 500 B.C. is correct,
but 500 A.D. is wrong.  It should be A.D. 500, since "A.D." is Latin
for "in the year of the Lord", and this phrase makes sense only if it
is used in front of the date, not after it.  A group of Irish monks
(if that's who you're talking about) would certainly never make so
fundamental a mistake in Latin as to get that backwards!

> Yes, in Holland and ALL through Europe they have always colored the
> coins in $crooge's Bin to be all GOLD.

Do they make any effort, in any published editorial or letter column,
to reconcile this coloring scheme with Barks's paintings of the money
bin, which clearly show that this is wrong?

Wilmer