I regularly have to talk to American clients during my working day and I never fail to get confused when discussing dates with them! Why oh why do you have the date format month, day then year as opposed to the more logical (IMHO) day, month then year? I always have to do a double take when inputting dates of work we have done if it is an American client calling as I have made mistakes in the past. Can anyone tell me why you guys use this format?
I believe it’s a holdover from the common written format, e.g., October 24th, 1929. I do realize that some places have used ‘24 October, 1929’ but that format has never been in common use anywhere in North America.
Because in English we say, “December 1, 2004.” Not 1 December 2004, as is the format in many foreign languages.
We do? I’ve always found “first of December” far easier and more ‘natural’ than “December the first”.
Of course, in astronomy, we either give the date in YYYY-MM-DD format, or just to confuse everyone, in Julian days.
I have never met an English person who says anything other than ‘1st of December 2004’, actually come to think of it maybe I have? I haven’t ever really thought about that…
To further confuse the issue, the U.S. Government also uses dd/mm/yy format unless you’re billing them in which case it’s yyyy/ABR/dd with ABR being a the letter abreviation of the date.
That should read with ABR being the three letter abreviation of the month as in APR.
Maybe we’ll switch to a more sensible format when we pull our heads out of our asses and switch to metric. That might make too much sense though.
“America - Baffling the rest of the world since 1492”
It’s not “December the first”, it’s “December first”. I quite agree that the former sounds odd. Seems as though this is a gas/petrol sort of thing.
“December first” is even odder than “December the first”
Because we can.
Because in English we WRITE “December 1, 2004,” rather than “1 December 2004.” So when we WRITE the date in numeral format, we WRITE 12/1/04 and not 1/12/04.
Sheesh.
“December the first”? Sounds bizarre to me.
“When is Christmas Eve?” “It’s December the 24th.” (I could see saying, “It’s the 24th of December,” but not “It’s December the 24th.”)
Who talks like that?
Why can’t everyone just put dates in the format that I like best? I get along fine for years, and then I chance 21/10/1944 in some history book and get all flummoxed. What month is that?! 
With a tone more addressed to the OP, don’t confuse convention with logic. If everyone on the planet used an MDY format then no-one would think it too illogical. Only the fact that there are two conventions in place throws it into sharp relief. I agree that DMY is more logical than MDY but we’re speaking of information and a steady convention is more important than strict logic, in this case.
For an example of convention over logic think about where time of day is usually placed. The majority use either MDYT or DMYT for a format, both of which are illogical. But everyone understands what the time of day looks like in print and there’s no confusion.
As an aside, I think that YMD will win out in the next generation, or so (or even YMDT.) It makes it easier to sort your files, dontcha know…
Just because you say it one way doesn’t mean that it’s not more sensible to write it numerically in ascending order of dd/mm/yy in my opinion. I suppose it is a case of what you are used to but I still find it slightly hard to process when I hear it mm/dd/yy, maybe my internal cogs need oiling? I put it down to a gas/petrol thing as Gorsnak said.
Deal with it. 
As I said, written/spoken expression of the date in North America has always (and by always, I mean for at least a hundred years or so) been month/date/year. This has all the force of any other linguistic convention. “December first” sounds odd to you for precisely the same reason that “I took the lift up to my flat” sounds odd to me.
Since this isn’t an issue except when months are converted to numbers, I suggest we stop doing that. Computer memory is no longer so constrained that there’s any harm in using a text field for months.
It’s not a time constraint issue any more, it’s more of a sorting issue. For computers, I don’t see that it’s better to have a mmddyyyy format than a ddmmyyyy format. Databases natively store dates in the format yyyymmdd - that way if you sort them, it comes out correct. Of course, you can set stuff up to show you the date in any format you want, including mmddyyyy or ddmmyyyy.
So in terms of computers, it doesn’t really matter what date format we humans use - we already translate back and forth all the time. Java, for instance, allows you to set a “Locale” - set to US, it displays dates in the US format, set to Europe, I’m sure it displays dates in their preffered format (I’ve never actually done it). It would be nice if we all just picked one format to go with to avoid the sort of problems WILLASS describes. It would also be nice if we just sucked it up and moved to metric, already.
We gave the British date format the old heave-ho along with Mad King George and afternoon tea. It is a freedom thing, I think.
No we don’t though, only in American English do you write “December 1”, you’d write “1st December” in UK English.
“The 1st of December” and “December the 1st” are both commonly used and acceptable formats in UK English (and non-American English in general).
May be the UK way does have slightly more logic as it lists time as increments (but then you could argue 2004/12/01 would be more logical as it fits with the left to right convention), however there’s little practical difference between the two and it’s mere a matter of convention.
I’ve been taught to write “2 March 1999.” The reason my grade teacher told me was that if your writing was messy, people wouldn’t get confused and think it was March 21 and they had somehow travelled a millenium back in time.
Still, I use mm/dd/yy because that’s the format my watch gives me the date in.
As for reasons, here’s my theory: I think standard date notation is year-month-day. This makes sense, but it isn’t really practical; if I have a date on the 20th of April, I’m not going to write 2004/4/20. Most people don’t plan dinners a year or two in advance. So I would just write down 4/20 on my hand, or planner, or wherever. So the month is written before the day until one day, someone decides the year is important and sticks it on the end. (It’s important, but still not as important as the day or month.)
Because, although we like to think of the English as stogy and stuck to the “old ways,” we are much more so.
I always use dd\mm\yy unless, in filling out a form, it would cost me some money or jail time.