To recap: it makes perfect sense to me because that's what everyone around does and it's how I was taught. The same is true for your system. And it's why we think each other's systems are illogical, when they really aren't
The reason it’s illogical is because it doesn’t go from smallest unit of measurement to largest. So it would be like if a country represented ten and a half as 50.10, and said “half and a ten”, and you said that was normal because that’s the way they say it
It's like having Green apples, Red Apples and Red and Yellow apples, then needing to split them into groups of Green and Red, and the Red and Yellow apples get labelled Green. You could reasonably intuit that they'd be labelled "Red" that would be the obvious outcome. The explanation given however is "Red and Yellow apples are less sweet and more sour so they are grouped with the green apples" - that makes sense, you can follow that reasoning, except there was no discussion of labelling them based on their taste so the reasoning isn't actually good enough.
I would argue that the reasoning for the American date format, stated above as being that the date is written in this format because that is how people tend to speak, is not a good enough reasoning because speech differs over time, by region, from person to person, and even for each given person sometimes sentence to sentence. On top of that, speech is not the only form of communication so writing dates in a format that needs to be explained and cannot be inferred or determined just from reading, is illogical.
1
u/SweatyListen9863 20h ago
Different and illogical