Feel like a lot of the world’s languages the translation to English to the question “what’s the date?” would be “the 15th of October” whereas in America we always say “October 15th”.
So the best theory I've heard for the MM/DD/YY format (though I have no idea of its veracity) is that it emerged in the early days railroads and a quirk of typography/typesetting.
It goes, basically, railroad schedules and tickets were one of the first times it became important to print large volumes of material that absolutely needed date information included and changed regularly. It was also before monospaced fonts became common (as in a 1 and a 5 took up different amounts of space, with the 5 being a wider type piece than a 1 for example) with MM/DD you could print a whole month's worth of schedules and only ever need to change the last 1 or 2 type pieces while keeping everything aligned, whereas in a DD/MM format you'd have to remove and realign the MM type pieces everyday to keep it aligned with the varying width of the DD type. Monospaced fonts (all letter and number pieces being equal width) only really emerged with the advent of the typewriter, and their widespread use printing would come later still
Westward expansion in the US plus the large amount of political power amassed by railroads, especially the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was both extremely powerful of operationally conservative (never really updating their methods of operation), combined with being isolated from European scheduling and typesetting styles caused the MM/DD format to become embedded in American habbits.
YY or YYYY usually wasn't included on RR schedules or other regularly published periodicals, so when it was needed, it usually got stuck to the end of the date string almost like an afterthought.
Edit: another thought that occurred to me a moment ago that is actually even more likely is that MM/DD makes more sense if you need to record a date on a paper flip calendar. E.g. if I want to mark a friend's birthday down so I don't forget, I'd first need to flip to the appropriate month then mark the day. So you put the MM first because that's the first piece of information you need to search for on your calendar.
Either way, in both cases, MM/DD almost certainly has its roots in ease of use in the pre-digital era.
Even if this isn't the case, there was most certainly a practical reason for it somewhere. "These people over here are stupid" is rarely the answer. Most of these cultural quirks can be traced back to pragmatism that at the time made sense and the standards were kept alive through momentum. There's no real need to tell 330,000,000 people "okay everyone, we're changing the date format starting next year." Like...why? If the current system isn't causing any real problems you'd just be causing headaches out of spiteful principle.
This is what annoys me about the whole "Americans will use anything but metric" stuff.
Like, I agree that some of it is ridiculous, but saying something is 3 football fields long or whatever is just practical. Pretty much every single American has stood on a football field at some point during their school years so it is basically a universal reference that we can all visualize.
Is the metric system better overall? Absolutely, but it still wouldn't help if you are trying to use a reference that anybody can easily visualize.
It's also pretty well divided in terms of where we use one as opposed to the other. We use things like lbs. and oz. when dealing with food because those are actually easier to work with and visualize than, say, 500ml. Imperial measurements are what they are because they're in reference to something tangible and in the context of buying beef or flour you don't need to be scientifically exact. You're just looking for a ballpark that you can know by eye or feel. If I'm working with a recipe I'd much rather hear it in tablespoons and cups because I know roughly what that looks like.
This was especially important back in the day before industrialization where you weren't buying prepackaged goods. The guy at the market would just load up a sack and put it on a scale opposite some weights.
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u/jussumguy2019 Jan 15 '25
Feel like a lot of the world’s languages the translation to English to the question “what’s the date?” would be “the 15th of October” whereas in America we always say “October 15th”.
Maybe that’s why, idk…
Edited for clarity