Does this bug you?

[pixiecrinkle]

I keep coming across news stories that use the word "ancient" in a way that I didn't think was correct.

For instance, in this story about trying to identify a skull that may or may not be Mozart's, the following phrase appears:

forensics experts admitted Sunday on national television that they still can't say with certainty whether an ancient skull belonged to the composer, as some believe.


My first gut reaction was "Well, if it's 'ancient' it couldn't be Mozart's because it wasn't quite that long ago that he was around."

So I looked up the definition of "ancient" and it seems that it is acceptable to use it to mean "something really old" whereas I thought it was meant to be used to indicate something specifically at or before what we refer to as Ancient Greece or Rome.

Opinions?? Do I need to let go of this particular grammatical pet peeve?

Comments

[laurelian.livejournal.com]

I've never related the word 'ancient' specifically to Ancient Greece and Rome, but I agree that it doesn't feel right to refer to a skull as ancient when it's suspected that it was Mozart's skull.

I guess my definition of ancient would be anything of or relating to history prior to 1300 or 1000 A.D. It's sort of an arbitrary time period, I suppose, but when I think about things that happened in say, the 1400's, I don't feel like those things are really ancient. The Renaissance doesn't feel ancient to me, so for something to be ancient to me it has to have happened sometime prior to that.