We might as well ask you why you put a period (.) between the day and the month. It’s a mere social convention, right?
I, for one, normally write the date as yearmonthdate, so today would be 080722. When sorting in a database, any date prior to 2000 gets a leading decimal (.991231).
Yup, it¨s the way I was taught to write numbers back in the day.
As for the OP, like I wrote before, I’m happy with the answers I’ve gotten.
I still think it looks weird in number form though 
But that is just a social convention.
It’s for this very reason that I eagerly adopted the Navy’s date system when I was exposed to it. Today is 22Jul08.
It’s about as unambiguous as you can get and still be short enough to jot down quickly.
Well, one of the Easy Days is coming up soon: 08/08/08. 
Though I almost always put my numerical dates in yyyy-mm-dd format. Canada is wildly inconsistent in its usage of date formats, with dd/mm/yy, mm/dd/yy, and yy/mm/dd all being encountered. After encountering one too many dates such as 11/08/07, and having no fricking idea what was intended, it’s ISO 8601 format or nothing for me.
Putting in a new computer system for a Canadian company a few years back we observed that some of their systems used US date format, and others used normal format :). They asked us to configure the new system to military format to avoid further ambiguity.
You mean American English.
Yes
Let me give you an example of this craziness:[ul][]My cheques, from the Royal Bank, have yyyymmdd (with little boxes for each numeral).[]This receipt from the TTC ticket machine has mm/dd/yyyy.[]This ATM receipt from the Desjardins machine in the basement of UQAM: d MMM yyyy (the month is spelled out).[]An ATM receipt from a Royal Bank machine: dMMMyyyy (the month is spelled out, but there are no spaces between the components of the date).[]Restaurant receipt from Bistro Sanguinet: mm/dd/yy.[]Dates on back of Montreal Metro ticket: yyyy-mm-dd. (Finally, ISO 8601 complance! Yay!)[]Validity dates on my bus pass: dd MMM yy (again with the month written out in a three-letter abbreviation).[]Receipt from Valu-Mart: mm/dd/yy.[/ul]All that money we save on billing complexity with single-payer health care? I think it ends up dealing with this.
At least in German, where the format is DDMMYY, it’s customary to put periods between the day and the month, and the month and the year (so July 22 would be “22.7.2008”). I don’t think it’s a social convention which specifically refers to dates, though; it’s because the day and the month are pronounced as ordinal numbers when spoken (the day would be pronounced as “the twenty-second seventh two thousand and eight”), and adding periods is the usual way to turn a cardinal number into an ordinal number in writing, very much the way “st”, “nd”, “rd” and “th” are used in English writing.
I agree, however, that the easiest way is to spell out the name of the month. I prefer to do that, at least if the day in question is between the first and the 12th days of the month. In other cases, there’s no ambiguity.
Oh yeah. Not only do you get lenghts of 28,29,30 and 31 days, then there’s actual months, four-week months and calendar months (4.4 weeks). GAAAAH! :smack:
And to answer the OP - because that’s just how American do things, as part of their continued attempts to drive the world mad. I’m still trying to figure out if it was done in retaliation to or provoked the european practice of using comma as a decimal and point as a thousands separator. That’s another winner in the international standardisation stakes. 1,000. 1.000 One or a thousand? Depends on who wrote it…
:dubious:
(1) I have never seen a person in India write a check in any language other than English.
(2) I should think that checks that are written in Hindi would be likely to be handled only by people who can read Hindi.
(3) If the month is written in Hindi, then isn’t the rest of the writing on the check also going to be written in Hindi? So aren’t you still going to need a person who reads Hindi?
(4) If the month is written in Hindi, isn’t there also a strong possibility that the writer will use Hindi numerals instead of Arabic numerals? So aren’t you still going to need a person who read Hindi?
(5) I thought that it’s pretty clear that banks don’t care what the date on the check is.
(6) A bank that gets the occasional check in Hindi should have access to quick translation services. First of all, it’s a bank. Banks have resources. Second, It’s not like, with the Internets and everything, that “जुलाई” is going to take days or weeks to translate. Hey! Look what I found in less than 30 seconds of searching.
(7) A bank that gets lots of checks in Hindi should already have a system worked out, shouldn’t they?
(8) Standardization monkeys are annoying. People in different countries do things in different ways, including speaking different languages. We’ve had millennia to get used to it. So, get used to it.
Back in the old days, we all used to used periods for abbreviations. My understanding is that in German, in “6. Juli,” the period is there to indicate that “6.” is an abbreviation for “sechst” and not the cardinal “sechs.”
Well, assuming that for some bizarre reason you see a check which has one random word or phrase in Brahmi script, how would you know it was Hindi and not Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Sinhalese, Burmese, Thai or whatever?
Check out the first part of what you quoted. Banks are likely to have resources to deal with such situations.
A person who received such a check is likely to live in a place where people have some knowledge of such writing systems. Furthermore, People faced with such problems do not have to solve them in isolation. We’re talking about banks here. There are other people to ask for help. Having to deal with the issue of foreign languages in international transactions is hardly a new problem.
I don’t know about the legalities, but if you send a company a payment by cheque, the banks won’t cash it if is is stale-dated (dated for over 12 months in the past), or post-dated (dated for the future). I understand that banks legally can cash post-dated cheques, but most don’t because the hassles created by bouncing cheques and irate customers aren’t worth it. Most companies that I’ve worked for would rather have a post-dated cheque as payment than sending a bad debt to collections (slightly better chance of getting all the money owed.)
Sunspace, I think you’re onto something there. Some kind of law of conservation of confusion. 
One of my colleagues used to work in a bank. He ended up as unofficial Chief Interpreter of Cheques and Other Documents With Piss-Poor Writing. If presented with something that looks like it has been scribbled by a drunken baboon, photocopied twice (badly), faxed three times in sucession, microfiched, retrieved (badly) and then vomited on, washed and tumble-dried, he can glance at it and reel off a string of numbers and letters. I daresay there are other people with similar skills in the area of ‘figuring out what the hell the customer meant’
OK, so we have settled that the US and the rest of the English speaking world write (and say) dates differently, and that arguments can be made for either way as the best/most logical. Presumably there was one original way in England (where I understand English originated!), so the interesting question is: which group (US or the rest) changed, when, and why?
Heh - customers would get pissed at having their cheques returned to them because we couldn’t figure out what they had written, but they don’t realize the efforts we went to trying to figure out if that was a four or a nine. Companies want to cash your cheque - they only return them if they have to.
Same thing on my message board. (In vBulletin, you can customize the date format.) An American date format would alienate those outside of the US, the European format would alienate the largely US/Canada-based membership, so I said “Screw it. I’ll alienate everybody equally.” 
iSO 8601 is useful for large archives of messages; it allows someone to tell at a glance whether a message is relatively current or quite old.
ISO 8601 really does make more sense, because it puts the largest units first, just like the the Hindu-Arabic numeral system.
When I write the date in everyday correspondence, I use the European format, even though the US format feels more comfortable. In an everyday short to medium-term timeframe, I naturally think month first, date second; the year seldom matters.
As a useless piece of information, when my father worked in the UN in New York everyone did it the European way. They also crossed their sevens for some reason I can’t fathom.
Oddly enough Wikipedia has an article on the crossed “Z” , but I can’t find one for the crossed “7.”