Map of which countries post dates in the right way or the wrong way

I'd say it is because of the linguistics and formal writing. Paper wasn't available in such quantities as it is today, and the colonials had to stretch things out. B. Franklin came up with daylight savings to conserve candles for example. Dropping the 'of' meant less ink and paper space use while extending the life of the quill.

There is logic to putting the month first. Every one of them has days 1 through 28 in common at least. Without the month, how do you know in what part of the year a lone day belongs. The month goes first because it is more important.It is the same with our addresses. The apartment, if needed, is placed after the the street. You can't find the apartment without first getting to its street.

The year gets added at the end since most correspondence didn't take place across years, and it was a safe assumption that the current year was the one being discussed. The headings on personal letters may have simply been the month and day.

It is clumsy in regards to data filing systems, but remains a traditional holdover. I didn't realize that the US was basically the only country to use this format though.

 

The US is also one of the very few countries officially not using the metric system, which the YMD date format is part of. I think the other two are Liberia and Burma.

 

Hi hkmb,

Yes, I have been a slacker.

Being in IT, it would come as no suprize I like CCYY-MM-DD the most and think China and Japan have it right.

 

Cos it's easier to say June 5th than "the 5th of June".

But as the map shows. Everybody else uses the 21-11-2013 format. Everybody else uses Celsius. Virtually everybody else uses metric (even if colloquially use miles or yards), but not America.

When the civilised world consisted on US and Europe (and Oz and Canada) you could get away with it. Forty years later everyone is civilised and you're left behind. Where are all the tallest skyscrapers? Who's landing on the moon? It's not America any longer. You guys are where we were in the 1950's. The realisation that your time has gone will come soon enough.

 

7 and a half this morning, and snowing. you lied to me.

most of us already know it, just look at the u.s. debt clock. it's the rest of the world that hasn't caught on yet. they need to realize that our bribes are simply rerouted from china.

 

Or maybe they expect an English accent to sound like either Hugh Grant or a cockney geezer. Anything else is, well Australian.

Saying that, where I work now in my small office I have an Irish boss, and Aussie, Kiwi and South African colleagues. Any Yorkshire accent has been well and truly watered down for sure. At least we all come from places that drive on the correct side of the road. Can't believe the Americans were influenced by the French and now drive on the wrong side! The French! I mean! America influenced by the French! ha ha ha

Freedom fries anyone?

 

Yeah well I'm a Euro migrant, grew up in NSW and Puskas was my childhood hero. I played League because we didn't have soccer teams at school. I love both codes but AFL ranks behind synchronised swimming and rugby Union in that order for me.

Hmmm.... I did grow up near a town that very much copied the French when it came to what the tallest building in town should look like. So I can't really criticise them for that.

[/quote]


But the Americans gifted them with that!

"Here" is a matter of perspective!

 

How much of that correspondence involved a single topic that spanned several years? When talking about events from the recent past or near future, do you use last or next year, or actually say the numerical year?

It is possible that reading comprehension and common sense was just more widespread. If I say next April and it is December, I don't expect people to think I'm talking about April 2013.

Of course, the mm/dd/yyyy format may simply be because the writing rule of spelling out a number when it starts a sentence had people starting with the month instead of the day or year.

With a background in the sciences, I don't get the resistance to the metric system. It is probably some silly cold war thing, or people thinking it will be burden to relearn things while not considering it will make things easier for their spawn.

 

i feel like i'm chasing my tail.

 

Interestingly, the American format is completely different than the American military format which is

30 AUG 85

For the same reason that the military uses a 24 hour clock, it is based on the idea being to make it as foolproof as possible. An all jokes aside, that counts for a lot.

 

It's the year 102? The 103-year-olds really were born before the beginning of time.

 

Now that we've established the correct date format..... ....how do we go about it getting it adopted world wide?

 

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), to which the USA kind of subscribes, has had the date standard defined for many years. They've been pushing it since 1976 (based on work started in 1971), so over forty years now!

ISO 8601 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

That comes right after we adopt the metric system.

 

We did adopt the metric system, back in the mid-late 1800s.

Getting the ordinary citizens to use it in their regular daily lives is an entirely different matter.