Or, “the second month, the fourteenth day.” What’s up with this? It strikes my ear as such a bizarre way to say a date. Is this some regional or ethnic thing?
It sounds better than “Month Two, Day Fourteen”?
I don’t understand what you mean…are you saying people say that instead of “February fourteenth”?
It sounds like a direct translation from a language such as Japanese.
Although I’ve seen formal usage along the lines of, “On the fourteenth day of the second month of the Year of Our Lord two thousand six”.
So, you have something against ordinal numbers? What makes you think they could be “regional” or “ethnic”? It’s a convention of the English language. In English, we have three traditional ways to say the date:
- February fourteenth
- February the fourteenth
- The fourteenth of February
Today some people just say, “February fourteen,” but I think that’s an influence from print media which often drops the -th, -nd, and -rd.
I’ll ask someone to verify their date of birth and they say for instance “the tenth, the twenty-second” instead of “ten twenty-two.” Probably 98% of the people who express the date in all numbers (instead of using the name of the month) I talk to say “ten twenty-two” so it sounds strange to hear it the other way. From my thoroughly unscientific sample the people who say “the tenth, the twenty-second” are over 40 and usually over 50, tend to be from the South and for lack of a better term “sound black.” Which is why I’m wondering if it’s a regional and/or an ethnic thing.
You’re living in the past, man!
I have never heard anyone say either “the tenth, the twenty-second” or “ten twenty-two” when asked the date of their birth. In what region or sub-culture is this common?
I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking the question.
I do it when giving my date of birth - “seventeen five eighty-two” (fictitious date 
)
Sure, if you’re Charles Dickens and get paid by the word…
Hm. I never really thought about it, but while I’d never give a current date in those terms (like if someone asked me today’s date, I wouldn’t dream of saying two-fourteen-oh-eight), but whenever asked my birth date, it seems natural to say eleven-ten-sixty one.
But I’ll be damned if I know why.
When I’m giving my DOB for verification purposes, I say “three, sixteen, fifty-two” (not my real DOB, offered for illustration only). If I’m giving it for data entry purposes I say “zero three one six one nine five two” because of the ridiculously high number of times I’ve had to retype numbers because people feel compelled to combine them into larger numbers instead of just reading off the digits (“sixty two three”…is that 623, 6023 or some other freaky number combo?).
Am I missing something? Why do you say " three, sixteen, fifty-two" instead of what seems to me to be the natural “March 16, 1952”? I know I’m out-of-date in a lot of areas, but have I missed somehow a change in how dates are described?
I have never heard of anyone giving dates this way. I’m fascinated.
I’ve said just the numbers when telling someone entering the date into a computer. Because then the person entering it doesn’t have to convert the month into a number, you’ve already done it for them. And some people have trouble with that.
It’s definitely common amongst southerners, particularly the elderly and blacks. As an import yankee who collects a lot of demographic data at work, it’s a constant annoyance.
But this assumes that the computer takes the date in Month-Day-Year format, which isn’t always the case (or is this generally more uniform in the US than it is here in Canada?)
I find it best to say June 4th, 1978 (for example) and let the person enter it as they need to. My school forms wanted YYYYMMDD while my previous job was DDMMYYYY and the job before that was MMDDYYYY. Some even require the month to be spelled, or the abbreviation entered.
I think some people may do this to clarify which number means the month and which means the day of the month, because in the US we state these in the order opposite to the way most of the world does it.
It may also be that some people use the day of the year (for example I was just downloading GPS data files from a NGS website that refers to February 7 as the 38th), and some people use the week of the year (“Do you have any days open in Week 44?”). I think both of these are more common in Europe than in the USA, but without being specific you may not be able to tell for sure.
It is a pain in the butt for an American to ink into a paper calender appointments for 4/6/08 and 4/8/08 and then be asked, “OK, can we also schedule one on 22/8/08?”
For my part, I like to write dates like 2008/02/07, because I have never seen a yyyy/dd/mm format so I think it’s safe to interpret 2008/02/07 as yyyy/mm/dd without all the extra words.
Plus, it’s easily sortable, and it’s the ISO standard date format (although I think maybe with hyphens instead of slashes). This is how I write all dates, but I wouldn’t consider saying “two thousand seven oh two fifteen” if somebody asked me the date.
Anytime anyone asks me for my date of birth, I say “October tenth, nineteen seventy one”. What’s wrong with that?
Come on, really? Even if their job is asking people their birthdate and then entering it into a computer?
>Plus, it’s easily sortable
Right! I’ve written computer programs that generate their results in files named with this so that they sort themselves by time. The file time and date is either when the file was created or when the writing was stopped - I forget which - but I’ve used this method to make files sortable by whichever one isn’t already the file time and date.
>and it’s the ISO standard date format (although I think maybe with hyphens instead of slashes).
Oooo. Must look into this.
>This is how I write all dates,
Well, see, you’re a man after my own heart.