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He presumed anyone with the wherewithal to get themselves to the moon would be well educated, know Latin, and understand that “A.D.” is an abbreviated form of “Anno Domini” which means, in English, “In the Year of Our Lord.”
Regrettably, there was no spell checker available to the writing team. William Safire was mortified once he discovered that a well-educated grammarian would instead have written, “A.D. 1969.” He found solace in the area’s lunar traffic reports. In the 40 years from1969 to his death in 2009, traffic near the plaque was negligible.
For about thirty years, he kept this embarrassment a secret. Then, in 1997, he submitted an article in the New York Times. He confessed his grammatical short comings to the public. The emotional catharsis was euphoric. Such was the relief that he confessed one other faux pas as he bared his soul to the American public.
In 1969, the year the plaque was placed, sophisticated folks were growing increasingly sensitive to overt references to the birth of you-know-who in Bethlehem. For time immemorial, legal documents, academic books, parties and events of all sorts the world over were marked with “A.D.”, meaning, “the year of our Lord.”
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