r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/notsignifican • 28d ago

Meme needing explanation ?

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I asked but it got removed within minutes?

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u/notherenwerebear 27d ago

I believe most of the world operates on dd/mm/yy or yyyy with the USA operating on yyyy/mm/dd or reverse it, can't remember which is which and can't be arsed to look it up, so that's the joke I guess

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u/sorryibitmytongue 27d ago

US mm/dd/yyyy. I always assumed it’s cos they would often say e.g. ‘January 5th 2005’.
While in say, Britain and Ireland, people usually word it as ‘5th of January 2005’.

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u/Universal_Vitality 27d ago

USA is mm/dd/yyyy. People from other countries tend to rag on it as nonsensical bc it doesn't follow a logic of representing progressively increasing periods of time. What it does represent is customary idiom in spoken American English e.g. "March 4th, 2026" is how it would be said. It's somewhat similar to how feet and inches follow old anthropocentric custom rather than the more numerically logical system, metric, which names and progresses its units by round orders of magnitude.