this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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This isn't true, the most and least significant parts of a date and time vary dramatically depending on context, and required specificity.
In day to day conversation, the day is the most important, to the extent that people often won't use the date at all but the day of the week, "we're doing X on wednesday evening", etc. The year is a given, and the month doesn't matter because it's either the same, or the next one because tomorrow is the 1st or whatever.
If you're talking about gardening or something broadly seasonal, month is the most important. It doesn't matter if you plant the seeds on the 10th or the 20th, but it should be during February. And obviously years matter when you're talking about things that happened a while ago, and decades if it's a long time, centuries for longer, etc etc.
Having a format that consistently increases, or decreases, specificity over it's length makes sense. Having one that muddles it up is very weird.
Which really is why YMD:HMS is the king.
Well we agree on the last sentence anyway, but that also illustrates why both D/M/Y and M/D/Y are bad choices.... Because in the cases where you need the year, it means it figures in somehow and you're putting it last.
If the day is the most important, you just say 'the 15th' or 'Wednesday' or whatever. If the month is important, you can say 'May 15th' or the 15th of May (or, I guess 15 May?). But in the US we literally write like that. If the date is all you need, you say the date, if the month is important you give that info first (since if there is going to be confusion over the month, that's more important) so we say the month, then the date. IF we'd gone further and continued that path and actually wrote it YMD, we would have definitely won the high ground and settled our way as better, but because we decided the year could go at the end, we muddied things up and arguable came in second place...but we came in second place to an almost equally dumb, but one step more consistent, format.
DMY:HMS is still really dumb. Just that MDY:HMS is one step dumber.
I'm glad we agree MDY is worse, haha.