Another issue with calling 9/11 “the WTC attacks” is that there was already another (much less successful) terrorist attack on the WTC, several years prior (a truck bomb parked next to a structural column).
But yeah, most American calamities are named after the location where they occur.
In Quebec we use yyyy-mm-dd regularly. I just assumed they did in Europe. Ignorance fought.
Drifting off topic, but the ISO format is nice for computers because it sorts correctly. For example, if you put an ISO date at the beginning of your filenames, alphabetical order is also date order. None of the formats that put the year at the end do that.
Except that nowadays, computers are perfectly capable of correctly sorting all sorts of date formats.
Back when it happened, my wife went to some kind of meeting where people started talking about “September 11th”. She said one young fellow kept saying “9-11” every time anybody said “September 11th” (which was said more in my neck of the Midwestern woods at the time).
I thought at the time that he was being a bit hip and precious. But now that’s all anybody has called it for years. I maintain that it’s really no better than “September 11th”, which also rolls off the tongue, perhaps even better; IMHO, what it gains in “edginess” it gives up in respect for the moment. But the people have spoken, so now I say 9-11, so people know what I’m talking about.
Guess I’m just old. GET OFF MY LAWN!.
Yes, but the advantage of the ISO format is you don’t have to TELL the computer that it’s a date. If you had a bunch of files named “12-25-2014 Christmas”, “10-31-2016 Halloween”, etc., how would you see them sorted using a vanilla tool like Windows File Explorer (assuming these dates have no relation to the file modification dates)? With ISO dates, it would just work. I use ISO dates internally in a lot of programs so the sorting is easy and I don’t have to write custom sorting routines.
Moved to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Computers are perfectly capable of correctly sorting dates represented internally as simple binary numbers.
On the other hand, date formats are ambiguous, and external context is required to interpret them. “20170518” is particularly good because it is particularly difficult to misinterpret.
I like to see my dates as dd/mm/yy or yyyy (And I think the week starts on Sunday). But I’m a big fan of YYYYMMDD when manipulating data as text.
In France and in Québec, the events of September 11th, 2001 are usually referred to as les attentats du 11 septembre. Sometimes it’s hyphenated, sometimes the S is upper-case: les attentats du 11-Septembre (in that case, 11-Septembre becomes a name instead of a date).
In France, you also hear people pronouncing it as nine-eleven (in English) sometimes, but I don’t think anybody writes it that way.
I haven’t seen anybody use ISO 8601 as an excuse to skip the year entirely and write “9-11” or “911” or “9/11”. The entire point of ISO 8601 is to remove ambiguity.
I feel like I hear September Eleven/th just as much, if not more, than 9/11 here in Australia so it probably would have a better chance of being called that had it happened here. 9/11 is 9th November to us.
Most significant events here tend to be named after the place - the Port Arthur Massacre, the Lindt Cafe siege. But we do have Ash Wednesday, and Black Saturday (both big forest fires), which happened at a number of locations.
11 September 2001 fell on a Tuesday. It might well have become Black Tuesday, were it not for the fact that there was already a Black Tuesday which is also associated with New York city - viz., 29 October 1929.