Wouldn’t the official name be “Independence Day”? I thought “Fourth of July” was just a colloquial usage.
I’m in the US and sometimes write dates like 20120717, in big endian form. A big advantage to this for software developers is that you can sort a list/column/array/whatever in numerical order and it will necessarily sort by date as well, because later dates are necessarily higher numbers.
It really is the endian argument. And as usual, application makes the difference. Americans are used to notating dates the way they speak them. If you need to sort dates, big endian works better. We speak and write out numbers in big endian form, but do basic math in a little endian mode. Note the origin of the term endian, it points out the futility of arguing over which is better.
Yeah, I’ve taken up a lonely stand against the confusing and illogical U.S. usage by as much as possible writing dates as 17-JUL-2012 or 17-Jul-12.
When I’m semi-benevolent dictator (or just working for occasionally-sortof- benevolent dictator Skald), the U.S. will change their date writing convention to match Europe’s. Of course at the same time the Europeans will be taught to write long numbers correctly (commas should be optional, multiple elements, wheras there should be only one period.)
I write month/day/year (07/17/12) because that’s how I was requred to do it when I worked for the accounting department. I assume it is an accounting convention.
Outside of work I usually write the month out followed by the numerical day and year.
What’s illogical about it? Other than it’s not what your used to, which is always a legitimate reason to gripe about something.
It’s a difficult thing to determine in Canada. As usual, we never know whether to use the British system or the American system.
“What, spell bolour with a K?”
It’s very common in Britain to say ’ the 15th of August’, rather than ‘August the 15th’; if we also add the day of the week, the spoken format will almost certainly be ‘Tuesday, the 17th of June’, otherwise either is used.
American English uses that spoken convention, but not all places do, so it works fine as an explanation for why other countries don’t use that date format either.
I’m not sure on the situation in Australia/NZ, but due to the governmental ties with the UK, it would make sense for them to use the English style of date.
What a silly bunt!
I’ve done the same, though it was less my idea than the Christian Brothers. But even in high school, I could see that writing day-month-year was more logical.
I protest being called benevolent. As a dictator I’d be malevolent but lazy. Pogroms are too much work, so I’d have to settle for [del]occasionally[/del] periodically ruining the life of a single innocent man.
Because every form that I have filled out in my life in the US wants it in that form: mm/dd/yy. Or month/day/year.