Why do Americans put the date the wrong way around?

Why do Americans put the date the wrong way around?

Norm

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Bad stuck guess habits in I..

hehe

I suppose it's because we want to know the month first. ..and once we know the month. ...THEN we want to know the day.

The year is rarely referred to, a mere afterthought we tack on at the end if needed.

I think it's because when we write out our dates, we write it as such: Tuesday December 17, 2013. Which in numerical notation becomes 12/17/2013. So I guess it's not a very good translation from written date to numerical notation (more lazy than anything else), but it's what we're used to.

We are rewriting history

Ropes4u said:

We are rewriting history

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>>>>> :twothumbs

Huh? I thought everyone else had it wrong!

I write it the way it is said verbally, month then date. If someone asks the date, I say December 17th, not 17 December. Why would I write it the opposite way?

nbp said:

I write it the way it is said verbally, month then date. If someone asks the date, I say December 17th, not 17 December. Why would I write it the opposite way?

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Traditionally grammatically, I think December 17 is improper. The 17th of December is the proper way. As far as the mmddyy format, I had the same preconception as Teej.

Ropes4u said:

We are rewriting history

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Personally, I like to put the year first e.g. 131217. This is good for cataloging photographs and what not. But I believe we changed it to "rewrite history" and to go against the British who were upsetting us at the time. You know, by burning down the White House and Library of Congress along with a bunch of other places. The French were considering doing something similar during the French Revolution when they wanted to make a decimal week with ten days instead of seven. Only eight more days until the weekend everybody! Hang in there!

Mathematically, shouldn't it go from larger to smaller ? ... Year > month > day ... > hour > minute > second ... :thinking:

Like, thousands > hundreds > tens > ones > tenths > hundredths ... etc

Norm said:

Why do Americans put the date the wrong way around?

Norm

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Don't tell me the rest of the world went to the metric dates too!?! Somehow, we got left behind! We Americans are still stuck on confusing month lengths and 365.25 day years--leaping wildly every 4 years, just to make room for one more day of campaign ads. While the world enjoys a more simple, serene ten months annually, with simple ten day weeks, and totaling a round 1000 days each years? Thanks alot, Ronald Reagan!

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A brief web search seems to indicate that this is an oft debated issue with almost no clear answers on why anyone does it the way they do. :shrug:

dc38 said:

Traditionally grammatically, I think December 17 is improper. The 17th of December is the proper way. As far as the mmddyy format, I had the same preconception as Teej.

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How is it grammatically improper to write the month first?

Norm said:

Why do Americans put the date the wrong way around?

Norm

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Because we needed to be the opposite of anything British, like driving. You guys down under never fully understood.

I do a lot of on-going work with people in the EU. My solution is to always write out the month, or at least 3 letters of it, so that there is not any confusion. example a) 13 DEC 2013 or b) 2013 DEC 13. The advantage of writing it the (b) method is that it at least partially auto sorts files which are named this way, at least in the right year.

Similar to Lampbeam I guess.

Blueskies123 said:

Because we needed to be the opposite of anything British, like driving. You guys down under never fully understood.

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Actually driving on the right is more common than driving on the left.



Norm

Replicant said:

How is it grammatically improper to write the month first?

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Because of American English, just about ANYTHING can be turned into a..."noun" 'December 17th' is treated as a noun, but it is not. While universally recognized as a day or date, it could very well mean December OF 1917, etc.. '17th of December' is a noun as it represents the 17th day of December.

prepositions or something or other

Because we are trend-setters. You all need to keep up!