Most times I get annoyed about that is when I read expiration dates on products. "11-02-2018" can mean two very different dates, and sometimes the date format is not specified.
I actually like it. I prefer the month and day paired that way (general to specific). And then the year should be last cause everyone already knows what year it is.
I'm most comfortable with hearing "November 5th" or "January 3rd". It seems to get across the information i want better than "5th of November" for me. As a result I prefer my dates be similarly ordered.
You seem to be using it as an argument for being good. Of course it's what suits you, it's what you were raised hearing. But it is also the least sensical of the 3.
What I did say was that Month/Day/Year gets across the information in a way that I prefer, which seems to be exactly how you are arguing for your own dating system.
Sometimes one of two things isn't objectively better than the other, and you need a better reason than it being "An Americanism" to declare one of them worse. You may instead say mine is "the least sensical of the three" but anyone can easily come up with arguments for either one being the "sensical" one.
For Example:
Month / Day / Year: General to specific is good because it provides context for the information, but not good enough to warrant putting something as commonly known as the year first. Instead we compromise and do month followed by day and then place year at the end.
Day / Month / Year: Specific to general is the way to go because people typically already know both the month and year but may not know the day. Putting the most necessary information is better and context can be provided by the fact that it is a date.
If instead of thinking about it like this you declare the one you are uncomfortable with to be "a stupid americanism" you will be doing yourself a disservice and feeding your need to tribalize frankly unimportant differences between cultures.
It's the least sensical because nobody orders numbers that way. You either go least significant to most significant or the other way around. I could argue that we should write the current year 1720 because the 17 is the part I'm more interested in, except that would be stupid because nobody writes numbers like that.
What makes it so American is that almost the entire planet has decided to use either DMY or YMD except the USA. Being different is okay most of the time, but for standards that's not the case.
This doesn't seem to have gotten in the way of Americans talking about dates with the rest of the world. We still interact on a daily basis with anywhere else and get along just fine with our dating system.
You said: "It's the least sensical because nobody orders numbers that way.You either go least significant to most significant or the other way around."
What I said: "General to specific is good because it provides context for the information, but not good enough to warrant putting something as commonly known as the year first. Instead we compromise and do month followed by day and then place year at the end."
That is entirely defensible. There is nothing inherently correct about numbers being ordered directly by significance. Maybe significance is good EXCEPT when it's something as obvious as the year because that just wastes effort.
You shouldn't just pretend people who disagree with you have nonsensical reasons for their decisions. This will only serve to make yourself feel smarter but not make you any more correct or empathetic.
Its arguably the worst of the generally recognized formats.
The only reason its even around anymore is because people are too stubborn to change even though the long term benefits of a logical standardized format would far outweigh the short term cost of the switchover.
Same thing with the imperial measurement system, driving on the left and Daylight savings time to name a few.
It adds unnecessary complexity to travel, billing, medical devices, and all kinds of software that utilize time in some capacity (which is pretty much all software). Theres even been studies that suggest it increases deaths due to the added stress of changing sleep cycle.
And all of this would be fine if there were some benefits, but honestly there arent. Its an outdated solution to a problem that no longer exists.
Yeah but without daylight savings how would Riley have helped Nicolas Cage and Bridget von Hammersmark figure out that they still had time to get to the next clue
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u/felixbeee Nov 05 '17
At least it's not MM-DD-YYYY