The Declaration of Independence lists the date as July 4, 1776. Either Americans changed their dating format fairly early in their independent existence or we’d had the system prior to that date.
In perusing my copy of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes I note that Watson … er, Doyle writes the dates as “on the 4th of March” and “on the 10th of April,” etc. This is just one data point, from a British author who published stories on or around the turn of the century (which corroborates the Wikipedia citation).
In a previous thread on the subject I noted that our system of calendar notation could’ve been a lot worse. The date “10 kalendas Ianuarii” meant “ten days prior to the kalend (or first day) of January” which gave you the date of December 23rd of the previous year.
The Romans had evidently marked significant days of each month with names, and counted their calendar in anticipation of those events: 2 ides Augustarum meant “two days before the ides (middle day) of August.”
Pretty confusing stuff. Look here for more about that system. Imagine having to code that into Excel.
I for one would be happy to have it standardized one way or another…
I use yyyymmdd for file naming, as it makes it easy to do a sort, and have it always come back in the correct order.
mm/dd/yyyy for writing it out.
Of course, not knowing that PADI uses the “Non US” standard creates some confusion on my diving certificate. My Sept 8 birthday, which I wrote as 9/8/yyyy came back to me on the card as Aug 9 yyyy. Not a big deal, and easy to explain on the off chance that a dive shop says my birthdate doesn’t match my card.
Yeah, maybe…except this is the General Questions forum, not the IMHO or MSPIMS forum. If you don’t have a factual answer that contributes to the OP, it was my understanding that you’re supposed to forego answering. Especially after the OP requests that everyone get back on topic.
Ya got any idea how annoying it is to subscribe to a thread in which you asked a question, see from your e-mail that you have 8 new responses, and go into the forum to find that all the responses are shit?
In reading Mangetout’s link to the Wikipedia discussion, there’s a clarification on the idea of noun-adjective agreement. Specifically, one writer wonders whether a day is a property of a month, of the other way round.
According to the Latin origin of calendar time-keeping that I posted, “the ides of March” suggests that the day (the ides) is a property of the month.
In Romance languages, one describes an object by its noun first, then any adjectives which attach: one would say le stylo bleu in French, or la penna blu in Italian or la pluma azul in Spanish.
In English and German, the noun comes after the adjectives: the blue pen in English becomes die blaue Feder.
It’s probably not surprising, then, that the English version used to be backward of the French. I wonder if the German people wrote dates in that fashion as well, prior to the standardization.
I suspect that the answer to the question why? is a semantic one rather than a logical one. The answer is, “we write the numbers in the order we say them, because that’s how our language works,” with the notation that some countries with close diplomatic and trading ties decided upon a particular (but not necessarily more logical) standard.
How do the French and Germans write out longhand numerals (as in “one million, two hundred fifty thousand, nine hundred eight”)?
True up to a point. For one I don’t like being rudely yelled at because the OP doesn’t like the way a thread is going. That was my main point and I tried to state it nicely because the OP is a guest, not an experienced member. Also if everyone followed your strict guidelines all the threads in GQ would be about 3 posts long. The OP might be the one who thought of the question but the thread is for everyone. I agree that in this forum any “I like cats” hijacks should be kept to yourself. However I don’t see anything wrong with someone coming in with facts that may be tangentaly related to original question. If the OP doesn’t feel the question has been adequately answer feel free to restate for us what has not yet been answered. Remember shit is in the eye of the beholder.
No offense, but if people want to post extraneous crap, they should do so either in another thread, or at least post an answer before posting irrelevant junk. That was what was bothering the original poster, and it is legitimate when you are in a forum designed to answer questions with the Straight Dope. IMHO; I’ve had the same unhappiness before.
There is a difference between extraneous crap and factual information which is related to the question. I agree the first does not belong. The second is what makes the SDMB interesting. If you are not interested in what posters have to say you can email Cecil directly and he may answer in a column. Now I won’t hijack this thread anymore, this really is extraneous crap.
Normally, I would tend to agree with you. Often the “dicta” - the factual information related to the question - is very interesting on the Dope. But let’s be honest about this OP. It presents a moving target - something that is hard enough to hit even if the Dopers focus.
For example, in this case, the very first post was to a previous thread on the topic. It was full of “interesting factual information which is related to the question.” There were anecdotal experiences and plenty of editorial comments. There just weren’t any … um … answers. As early as post #3 (and I am not the OP) I hoped to get this thread on track and to avoid the trainwreck present in the previous thread.
So yes - the OP probably overreacted (especially with the colors … blech … why is that even a feature?) - but it was quite an effort to keep this thread on topic.