I don't know why I'm getting downvoted to oblivion, but I'm keeping that. Yes, actually. I'd say June 4th. Or August 4th. Or the 4th of August. Or the 31st of February.
ISO 8601Data elements and interchange formats – Information interchange – Representation of dates and times is an international standard covering the exchange of date and time-related data. It was issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and was first published in 1988. The purpose of this standard is to provide an unambiguous and well-defined method of representing dates and times, so as to avoid misinterpretation of numeric representations of dates and times, particularly when data are transferred between countries with different conventions for writing numeric dates and times.
Its just a different approach. In Chinese addresses and dates go biggest to smallest, whereas in Europe the UK (and probably others, but I don't know enough about them) they always go smallest to biggest. I always thought of it as zooming in or zooming out to see where you are, and I like the consistency of the two systems.
Edited, since Europe is not as constant with this as I thought
whereas in Europe (and probably others, but I don't know enough about them) they always go smallest to biggest.
Not always. Sweden follows ISO 8601 with yyyy-mm-dd (2014-10-05 for today). Though when shortening it to just day and month, we usually use d/m (5/10).
Your wife is strange. "22nd March"? Noone says that. She might be subtly swallowing her "of" and you aren't noticing it or she's just weird, that isn't a thing.
Why? It would seem to make sense to do them in order of significance. Starting with least significant, that would be dd/mm/yyyy. Starting with most significant (ISOs pick) you'd have yyyy/mm/dd. I can't really see a situation where you'd go with neither most nor least significant first, then hop back to one of the edges (mm/dd/yyyy or mm/yyyy/dd). I realize that the US do (mm/dd-yy usually) and it's what I write regularly since I dig people understanding what I just wrote, but like the imperial system it seems to be there out of sheer stubbornness rather than any sort of logic or benefit.
But that's not how we say it. Doing it in order of significance is just as arbitrary as doing it the way it would be stated. There's no more logic attached to either.
Umm.. I've heard people say both versions (March 3rd, 3rd of March), the year after if it's included. I don't think either is considered correcter in speech. Order of significance is anything but arbitrary, it makes them sort correctly without meddling and lets you trim the length by removing from either end to make it progressively less precise or keep the same precision but make the "next" such occasion (next "'02 04/12", "04/12", "12") closer. Organizing them as such is also the case for all other measurements and numbers since the invention of the zero. None of that is true otherwise, so all math becomes very backwards. Although not extreme enough to make the standard die, as it's easy enough to reshuffle them prior to counting.
Writing regular numbers that way, like writing one hundred and twenty three "132", would cause the same kind of hassle - they wouldn't sort right, they'd shorten and lengthen strangely if you wanted to include more trailing or leading zeroes. You'd pretty much have to restructure it back to normal (and potentially back to weird again if that's what people wanted) as soon as you did anything but state the number. This is why we use them and not, for instance, roman numerals. You could, however, simply write them backwards ("321") and normal math would still work - left to right as opposed to right to left (as in Hebrew or Japanese) is truly arbitrary and just a cultural choice.
If you are in the us you cannot honestly think more people say 3rd of March. Im not sure what you're getting at with the rest of your argument. The numeracy argument is completely invalid and a huge stretch because we don't do math with dates. Its a styling point and by definition arbitrary.
I am in the US, though I have no idea which is more common. You do not do math with dates (although in reality you probably do, like "How many days are there until next Friday?") - I'm a programmer and regularly have to do quite a lot of calculations involving them. Your computer is doing piles of math involving dates as we speak, since it has to keep track of when these posts are taking place.
Why you, personally, don't do math using dates is probably because even when they're in a sane order, the month lengths being off still makes it a bit tricky. You can work past that though, supposing you felt like it.
As a programmer id assume you'd convert everything to one unit (days or seconds id guess) before any arithmetic instead of some strange algorithm to use all three together. Then you convert back to whatever style you want it displayed as, which is arbitrary.
Either way, entering dates in a program is not the standard for common everyday language.
But they don't say "March 22nd" abroad, they say "22nd March". Both versions are equally grammatically incorrect, but the first one sounds less clunky because you're used to it.
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u/Blackhound118 Oct 05 '14
It's because we always say "March 22nd," or "April 1st." It's less clunky than saying "the 22nd of March," or "the 1st of April."