US Dates Are In The Wrong Order

Thank you to all my Patrons for supporting the channel!

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

[NameExplain]

What date order do you think makes the most sense?

[Rynosaur]

It almost always ends up that the "weird American thing" is actually an old British thing that they abandoned at some point.

[verity_nine]

This is why I prefer YYYY-MM-DD. There's no way to confuse it with the ambiguous formats. Database datetime formatting is the best.

[darreljones]

The best solution, actually, is to write out the name of the month, or at least abbreviate it, no matter the ordering. So, while some might think "2/10/2024" is referring to February 10th, nobody will be too confused if you write "2 October 2024" or "2 Oct. 2024".

[morefiction]

People are thinking about it too much. It's just language. We're just more likely to say October 2nd than the 2nd of October unless it's a special day like the Fourth of July. That carries over to how we write the dates. It only becomes annoying when I have to administer a computer overseas and a log written on October 2 looks like it was written on February 10.

btw, Brits, How does that poem for Guy Fawkes Day go? Remember, Remember the ...?

[WayneKitching]

The ISO 8601 format is YYYY-MM-DD. We were taught to use in grade 3 in South Africa. I don't know if it was just my teacher or if it was a national requirement. This big-endian system does make more sense to me. When sorting text representing dates, this will give the correct order when you are just sorting by text characters.

[naveenbhalla]

I work in data analytics. The middle endian date order causes data processing problems and I've personally spent hours trying to code around this on more than one occasion!

[luissantoyo]

To me it seems pretty obvious why America’s date format makes sense. When you look for a date on a calendar, you start by finding the month, then the day. So it follows that 10/2 is the obvious way to write it. The year could go at the beginning or at the end, and someone arbitrarily tacked it on at the end.

[ShawnRavenfire]

I think that the rule used to be "just use any order, " but they only got cemented in place when people started having to fill out standardized forms.

Personally, I think year-month-day makes the most sense, because it's consistent with hour-minute-second... or just with numbers in general.

[Lord_Skeptic]

I prefer year.MM.DD. because it goes from largest to smallest. We do that with time (HH:MM:SS) so we should do that with the date.

[coldhazzard]

Yes, unfortunately the Philippines also uses MM/DD/YYYY. That is the way it is typically taught in schools and lot of official forms and documents use this. It sometimes puts us at odds with our neighbors.

[ianmacfarlane]

Just watched a couple of 'The Click' videos where this highly contentious issue came up again and again.
The American version is weird, but I can completely understand why they'd be reluctant to change something so ingrained.
It's not a hill to die on.

[TheLobsterCopter]

I think they call it "4th of July" rather than "July 4th" to make the date stand out more. If they said "July 4th" it would sound like any other date, but saying "4th of July" gives it more weight.

[datprawn]

In Spyro 2, Hunter the Cheetah's birthday was revealed by the creator to be 22nd April 1975, rather than February 24th 1975 Americans once thought.

[Bruh-obmi]

I would argue that our format is the most sensible. Everyone else has it in the wrong order!

[densenrijslakucs]

I've never seen or heard of anyone use YYYY/DD/MM in Latvia. The example you gave is how we write the date with words, roughly translating to "The 1940th year's 20th of September". That's also an old newspaper, the newer ones I checked do 'Day Of Week, DD, month, YYYY'

[matthewgrgaddie]

I think the idea behind the middle endian system used by the United States is that months have the smallest amount of numbers at 12, days have the second smallest amount of number at up to 31, and years have the biggest amount of numbers, which is basically infinite.

[PabSungenis]

“The Fourth of July” was popularized by George M. Cohan with his song “Yankee Doodle Dandy, ” because “July” was easier to rhyme with than “fourth.” “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy /Yankee Doodle do or die / A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam / Born on the Fourth of July.”

[kayla_eevee]

While I understand why some people dislike this order, I will defend it for one reason. If I were to say today's date in casual conversation, I would say "October 2nd, 2024." Month, day, year. Of all the absurd Amercanisms, this is the one that bothers me the least.

[JulieStones]

Wonder if the Month/Day format would be more useful to a literate agrarian society? October is a harvest month; November is the winter preparation month; etc.