I teach English as a second language and regularly handle questions from foreign students about quirks of the American culture and language. This one stumped me.
Why do we Americans (except military and a few others) wrtie the date "Month, Day, Year? The rest of the world generally writes it Day Month Year. Is this like Imperial measures where everyone used to write the date this way but then changed and we didn’t follow or at some point did American just say “screw you world, I’m doing my own date thing”?
I have till Tuesday to come up with the right answer.
No offense, but I just read that thread and it seems supremely unhelpful. Lots of “yeah, they should be the same” or “who cares” or “at work we do it this way,” but not a lot of why America is on a different format for writing dates.
I don’t know the answer, but I would like to find out as well. Anyone else?
As a datum, in Canada, we tend to write the date in figures as DD/MM/YY, but in writing the date in words, we write November 24 (or 24th), 2005, not 24 November 2005 (though you do sometimes see this).
Thanks for your support. Unfortunately (not to pick on you Matt) I see the same thing happening here. As impolite as it sounds I really don’t care how you do it in other countries…I just want to know WHY we Americans do it the way we do.
True enough, but it raises the same question: why do Americans say it that way, when everyone else says it the other way? Even the US military uses the DD/MM/YY format, as far as I know (though I could be wrong on that - every correspondence I got from my AF dad, and the AF forms, etc. that I saw followed that convention).
I use dd/mm/yy for most things, but for monthly stuff, reports and so on, I use mm/dd/yy. Maintenance guys on the flight line do the same. Things that have to be tracked by month get the month-first treatment.
The best system is to use the Roman numeral for the month. This is commonly done in the Southern Cone of Latin America. Today would be 24/XI/05. Simple and elegant.
Perhaps is because thats the way the government wants it. My job in the aircraft assembly business is controlled by a lot of rules set forth by the FAA, one on those rules is that dates on all paperwork is done in the month/day/year format. I have seen a few folks try other methods of listing dates and it has resulting in redoing the paperwork with a stern warning of the consequences if they continue to not follow the rules.
I tend to present data this way when someone asks me for a customised (by which spelling you can correctly infer that I’m in the UK) sales report. YYYY/MM/DD is, as far as I’m concerned, completely unambiguous.
British spoken dates do tend to be “The twenty-first of September”, rather than the predominant American spoken style of “September twenty-first”.
Someone will no doubt point out that the American style is more economic (or ‘better, because it is more economic’) than the British style and I think this factor is actually quite significant; you see, (warning, sweeping generalisation ahead) we Brits just don’t really care that it uses more syllables, whereas it seems a fair few Americans do care, and see fit to make changes accordingly.
There’s an interesting suggestion at the bottom of this Wikipedia discussion (which should not necessarily be regarded as authoritative); it says:
Further up the page, it claims that the archaic British form was M/D/Y, so it was the Brits that changed it, not the Americans, but (for no particularly good reason), I suspect that to be false.
This does make sense. Also it should be noted that the further away from its source a language is the less it changes. So the English in America is more like the original than the English in England. This would back up the theory that the archaic British form was M/D/Y
Wow - this surprised me; I just checked out the diary of Samuel Pepys (c 1660) and for the most part, he doesn’t write full dates in a single expression (instead, the year is a heading, the month a sub-heading and the day is a sub-sub heading - it is a diary after all), but where he does write dates more explicitly, it seems he writes ‘[month], [day]’ or ‘’[month], [day], [year]’, not ‘The [day] of [month], [year]’ that I was expecting.
So the question now, I suppose is… why did the habit change in Britain and did it precede the spoken form, or not.
Why? Because we do what we learned, that’s why. As for why people started using it, well we say Nov. 24, 2005 and we just put that in figures. FWIW, I believe the ISO standard is 2005-11-24 and the reason for that is clear; we write other numbers in order of descending significance, why not dates. As a bonus, it makes sorting easier but I don’t think that was its purpose.
<hijack>
It does illustrate a mathematical principal. Although we normally use the same base for all the digits in a number, there is no requirement that we do so. The old British monetary used a mixed system in which the least significant digit was in base 12 (expressed as a one or two digit decimal), the second was in base 20 (ditto) and all the subsequent digits in base 10. I ignore guineas. But the calendar is even worse, since the least significant place is filled by a decimal number whose base can be any integer from 28 to 31, depending in a complicated way on the more significant places (mainly on the second, but sometimes on the third, the latter in a rather complicated way–divisible by 4 unless divisible by 100 and not by 400) and the second place is in base 12 and then the highest place is a decimal number. Imagine we learn and use this system daily.</hijack>
The truth is that nobody changed it - from a whole variety of different approaches, different places gradually settled on different standards, without any overall direction or any awareness that it could be awkward or confusing for future generations. Rather like 240v vs. 110v for electricity supplies.
Something I’ve quoted before in threads on the topic, but bears repeating, is this excerpt from the style guide of one big British newspaper:
Thank you thank you thank you
Nice to realize that we Americans are not innovators but in the case of measurements and dates we are just too darned lazy to change.
Cheers
Welcome and I hope you become a member. If you do you’ll realize that even if you start a thread you don’t own it. What a thread evolves into is sometimes much more interesting than the original post. You’ll get more results by gently reminding your fellow members of your question than you will by yelling.
Slight hijack: The military does not write the date as dd/mm/yy. That would be 24/11/05. Instead it would be dd/mmm/yy as in 24 NOV 05. Always three letters for the month, even JUN. At least it is in the army but I think its the same across the branches.