this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
1832 points (92.8% liked)
Memes
45535 readers
1265 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I really wonder how americans were able to fuck this one up. There are three ways to arrange these and two of them are acceptable!
Edit: Yes, I meant common ways, not combinatorically possible ways.
Hmmm more like 6 ways but I get your point
Three ways that people actually use. YYYY-MM-DD, DD-MM-YYYY, and MM-DD-YYYY (ew).
AFAIK no-one does YYYY-DD-MM, DD-YYYY-MM, or MM-YYYY-DD... yet. Don't let the Americans know about these formats, they might just start using them out of spite.
What the actual fuck
'hey man, what date is it today?' 'well it's the 15th of 2023, August'
Lmao, I want to try responding like this and see what the reactions are
I want to try this, too. Make it more possessive, though. The 15th of 2023's August. Really add to the confusion.
I'll avoid those at all cost and go with the new standard of YY-MM-DD-YY. What's the date today? 20-08-10-23
whoa, take it easy there Satan.
Need more julian dates, YYYY-JJJ.
What, 2023-223 for the 223rd day of the year 2023? That... is oddly appealing for telling the actual progress of the year or grouping. No silly "does this group have 31, 30, 29 or 28 members", particularly the "is this year a multiple of four, but not of 100, unless it's also a multiple of 400?" bit with leap days.
You'll have oddities still, no matter which way you slice it, because our orbit is mathematically imperfect, but it's a start.
So we need to correct our orbit is what I'm hearing!
That'd be a wack premise for a crazy scientist story
Twelve ways if you count two-digit years. My nephew was born on 12/12/12 which was convenient.
My grandmother was born in 1896 and lived to be 102, just long enough for the pre-Y2K computer systems in hospitals to think she was a two-year-old.
Ouch!
I lost about an hour of my life trying to create a historical timeline in MS Excel. Eventually learned this is impossible with dates earlier than 1900.
this guy does combinatorics
It's how the dates are typically said, here. November 6th, 2020 = 11/6/2020. [Edit: I had written 9 instead of 11 for November.] (We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.) It's easy to use, but I agree that YYYY-MM-DD is vastly superior for organization.
Where is here that November = 9? Probably somewhere you've had a long day
Oct = 8
Nov = 9
Dec = 10
In metric time there are only 10 months per year
When is your independence day, again?
Anyway, in Australia (and, I suspect, other places that use DD/MM/YYYY) we use "{ordinal} of {month}" (11th of August), "{ordinal} {month}" (11th August), and "{month} {ordinal}" (August 11th) pretty much interchangeably. In writing but not in speaking, we also sometimes use "{number} {month}" (11 August). That doesn't have any bearing on how we write it short form though, because those are different things. It's not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.
July 4th, why?
So, not "the fourth of July" as everyone else calls it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_%28United_States%29
"Fourth of July" is the name of the holiday. It happens on "July 4th".
"Independence Day" was a movie in the 90's. We never say "Independence Day" around here unless the topic is Will Smith or REM.
I see this weird argumentation every time the dating system comes up 🙄
It's kinda tongue in cheek, but that's how we say things in my part of the US. "Fourth of July" is spoken of exactly as if it were the name of the day, like "Thanksgiving" or "Christmas". Just like we still refer to "Cinco de Mayo" even though we don't speak Spanish.
Obviously it's not really called "Fourth of July", but nobody ever says "Nth of Month" here otherwise. And I'm kinda grateful as I like "bigger to smaller" notation. Yeah, mm/dd/yyyy sucks, but saying it that way is pretty expressive because the year rarely matters. So it's like "Hours and minutes" or (yeah, sorry Europeans) Feet and inches. Bigger before smaller quickly expresses precise information to our caveman brains. At least to my caveman brain.
Also, the movie really wasn't that good in retrospect, but we had some sort of fever about it because it was expensive with lots of explosions, and good music licensing. And both patriots and antipatriots had something to get out of it because aliens blew up the White House.
I've never once been confused about a written date whilst in the US. Your country's other-side-of-the-Earth flip-floppery on how it uses dates really doesn't (and shouldn't) impact our system, which we continue to use because it has proven effective and easy. Trying to stagnate an evolving culture/language is pointless and about as futile as trying to force a river to run backwards. If people start jumbling up how we do it here, like you say Australia does, then that will be right, too.
Saying it like that is no problem and not ambiguous. Writing it like that makes no sense though.
It is a bit of a chicken and egg question though. Because do Americans not say it that way because of the date format or is that the date format because you don't say it that way?
Because in countries using DD.MM.YY we absolutely do say 6th of November.
That's probably what happened. Though I do like starting with the larger context when talking about dates, but omitting it when talking about the current month or year.
I'm canadian and I've always prefered this format for the same reason. 11/6/23 is november 6th 2023, not the 11th of June 2023, that's weird.
As a different Canadian, I always use YYYY-MM-DD and a 24 hour clock.
Except that mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy can be ambiguous, I definitely prefer the former if I'm not using an ISO date. But normally I just write ISO and my head translates to MMM dd,yyyy