Why do Americans write the date in that odd way?

[Retro]

Since dates follow the general number positional notation, you'd think they should either be written as yyyy.mm.dd (big endian), or dd.mm.yyyy (little endian) and in most countries they're indeed written in one of those two ways. However, America has gone for mm.dd.yyyy for some unfathomable reason as it makes no mathematical sense and tends to cause confusion with dates like this: 11.8.2024, the date I've written this post on. This could be interpreted as either 11th August or 8th November so needs the context of the sentence that it's written in, which is often not available, leading to confusion. Only where the day is greater than 12 does it become unambiguous without external context, so this issue isn't a mere annoyance.

This video digs deep into this issue and tries to figure out why Americans write it this way. If you know, please let us know.

Personally, I prefer the big endian format which is actually an ISO standard nowadays since it's the most logical format to use, making today 2024.11.08.

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Positional notation - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Astro What]

Maybe because we use what came over when the country was founded and saw no need to do what everyone else decided to change to?
The UK didn't always use the day/month/year format.

 

[Retro]

Well that's the thing, the video shows that it wasn't actually consistent and there's no definitive answer for why it's like this. Writing it this way is a bit daft, don't you agree?

 

[Astro What]

Well that's the thing, the video shows that it wasn't actually consistent and there's no definitive answer for why it's like this. Writing it this way is a bit daft, don't you agree?

No, as I said, when the country was founded it was written that way in England. The US simply decided there was no reason to make a major change to adopt to the way others countries did it. Same way that we still use the Imperial system of measurements and have not adopted metric.

 

[live627]

Such adoptions have been tried—and failed.

 

[Retro]

No, as I said, when the country was founded it was written that way in England. The US simply decided there was no reason to make a major change to adopt to the way others countries did it. Same way that we still use the Imperial system of measurements and have not adopted metric.

Yes, it came from England, but America still tended to write it both ways sometimes back then, in other words they were inconsistent, as explained in the video. They then settled on the current format, but exactly why isn't clear as it makes much more sense to just do it properly, as I explained in my first post.

And as far as America being imperial, you might be surprised to learn that, at its core, America actually did go metric! They then converted all their primary measurements back to imperial for daily use for some reason, perhaps because it's so entrenched in society and the custodian being interviewed thinks it's daft, too. Here's a fascinating Veritasium video all about it:

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I really should make a separate thread about this.

 

[petermarkley]

The history and politics is complicated. I just found a video about it that mentioned American isolationism, and I think that’s a huge piece of the puzzle.

As for date format, I think it’s important to consider that during the majority of America’s existence, not only was mathematics considered a specialized field (which wasn’t even as married to science as it is now), but computers and the IT field were not even on the horizon.

I think it’s sort of difficult to look back now and appreciate what a massive and unexpected game-changer that was to our society and culture. The idea that the things we write might be structured into formal systems, to be processed by algorithms with no intelligent awareness of context, might be absolutely commonplace today but was unthinkable as recently as the 1950s.

Even as the formal structure of paperwork developed under pressure of brevity, I imagine the first thought for this was often to follow language, not math. Hence the American m/d/y format comes from how dates were often spoken in a sentence: “Today is September eighth, twenty-twenty-four.” Basically the numbers on the page were a stand-in for this sentence, not for the purely abstract datum. The very idea of an abstract datum was pretty new and alien to past generations.

Just my thoughts on the matter. Heck if I know the real answer

 

[petermarkley]

Oh and in case I left this unclear, I am mostly indifferent on the issue but 100% agree that y/m/d makes more sense from a mathematics and engineering point of view. I use it all the time personally.

 

[Astro What]

Naw...we all need to adopt the Federation star date format!

 

[Retro]

The history and politics is complicated. I just found a video about it that mentioned American isolationism, and I think that’s a huge piece of the puzzle.

If you could post that video, I'd be interested to see it. Would complement nicely the one that I started the thread with.

 

[petermarkley]

If you could post that video, I'd be interested to see it. Would complement nicely the one that I started the thread with.

Sure! (It was pertaining to the metric/imperial thing, not the date format thing)

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[Tiffany]

Honestly, it never occurred to me there was an origin to why American's write the date the way they do. I've been writing the date that way forever. The history and background shared is interesting though.