Why do Americans do the date differently?

[Therumancer]

Can some American escapists tell me why you guys do the date like this : month/day/year
instead of in order like this: day/month/year?
(I would have just google'd this but its better to get a wider range of answers and I wouldn't know how to phrase the question)

Because it's more efficient for purposes of record keeping. There is no other reason. I think it's a matter of other nations simply not wanting to change tradition in favor of efficiency.

Having worked with reports, it's like this.

You assign a drawer or whatever to a given year, typically the one your in, and then arrange the files or paperwork by the date, with the month being the first number in the sequence. If you did it by day you'd be wondering "the day of which month". The year is the last number in the sequence because your typically arranging your paperwork into compartments that already mark the year ahead of time so it's the least relevent when your looking at the paperwork itself.

It allows someone to rapidly get to the right month, and then get to the proper day.

At least that's how I learned it, going back to like college.

Still I don't imagine this will change many people's minds. The whole European vs. American thing has been going on for so long, I doubt it's going to change now. Europeans accuse Americans of changing things just to be differant and assert some kind of pointless differance, Americans accuse Europeans of sticking to inefficient traditions for no other reason than that is how they have always done it, or not wanting to admit that someone came up with a better way. It's largely pointless. What's more as I've never dealt with paperwork in Europe or organized along those lines, I have no idea how their systems tend to be organized, for all I know it could work better, but it doesn't seem like changing the order of the numbers could be of any benefit at all to me at the moment.

 

[SageRuffin]

Because we Americans are stupid.

That's not sarcasm; I'm dead fucking serious. Why else would we try to impose our rights and beliefs on other sections of the world? We're a bunch of fucking idiots who ultimately can't stand the fact that there are people who aren't cut from the same cloth.

 

[mr_rubino]

We just do. And to send it right back at ya, why do all of you Europeans and Asians drive on the left side of the road, huh? That's so silly.

Nah, just England and Japan. Two isolated islands. =P

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

They're still using the imperial system too. I think they do it as an extra middle finger to the world.

Whatever, its their country. Providing they aren't starting wars (and dragging us into it) or hurting our economy; I'm fine with the USA.

 

[zega frega omega]

Actually, that's a really good question. I have a better one though: why do YOU do it differently?

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Personally, I write it as such: 1 Jan 11. It makes more sense to me and makes it easy to differentiate between the three categories (numbers/letters/numbers).

However, it's easy to see that this is just another America-bashing thread. "God, you Yanks are so STUPID! Stop doing it that way; you should do it OUR way, because OUR way is RIGHT! We did it first!" Some people won't be happy until we write "colours" and say "leff-tenant". Not going to happen, and they'll never be happy.

 

[MagicMouse]

The date is January 1st, 2011.

The date is 01/1/2011.

It is written the way it is spoken.

No, the date is the 1st of January, 2011. This whole "it's the way it's spoken" argument holds no water for me, as I've never even heard Americans state the month first.

Do you live in America? I live have lived in the mid-west all my life and I have always heard the month first, even on tv and the internet. It would be interesting if it varied by region.

 

[GrizzlerBorno]

I have a theory:

Spoiler: Problem, world?

Ok lease don't laugh.... I've seen that image plenty of times before, but i don't know what it means or where it originates from.

 

[Warforger]

Can some American escapists tell me why you guys do the date like this : month/day/year
instead of in order like this: day/month/year?
(I would have just google'd this but its better to get a wider range of answers and I wouldn't know how to phrase the question)

Because they would say the date be "It is September the 8th of 1877" and so they had it like that instead. It's just tradition like keeping the old British Imperial system of measurements.

I have a theory:

Spoiler: Problem, world?

Ok lease don't laugh.... I've seen that image plenty of times before, but i don't know what it means or where it originates from.

Its troll face, it came from some cartoon which didn't make any sense but people thought it was funny

Because we Americans are stupid.

That's not sarcasm; I'm dead fucking serious. Why else would we try to impose our rights and beliefs on other sections of the world? We're a bunch of fucking idiots who ultimately can't stand the fact that there are people who aren't cut from the same cloth.

You realize most Western nations did the exact same thing right? The whole colonization of Africa and all. Hell the French Foreign Legion had to move its headquarters to France after France lost Algeria it's birthplace. The reasons were stupid as shit, some did it to spread Christianity, France conquered West Africa in order to restore its honor lost when Germany repeatedly invaded it (before WWI, by then Germany had spanked France 4 times in a row). Keep in mind they kept these colonies for a long damn time, it wasn't until the 60's when Africa became independent for example, another example is the fact that Britain owned and controlled Hong Kong until 1995 for no other reason then "We got this city from winning a war to keep selling the Chinese Opium"

Otherwise we're not really there to impose our belief systems on them as much as we are there to keep security, that's all the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are for, no one cared about how the Afghanni's were doing enough to do the same thing in the Spanish American war with the Cubans we're there mostly to kill the terrorist groups that attacked us. Keep in mind the US is the major power in NATO and the UN so it is its duty to do this shit, Britain has almost as many men in Afghanistan as the US.

Also many people in Afghanistan want the US to defeat the Taliban, few tribal leaders step forward as they're terrified of the Taliban.

 

[Ironic Pirate]

So there. Have your "Go America!" picture, have your date system. I'll have my date system, and I'll just make jokes about England just being mad that they lost all their colonies. Compromise?

We didn't lose them really... we gave them back. Just as silly, if I'm honest. Haha

Good point, although you did out and out lose America.

I really want to make a Canada joke here, but I promised I'd be nice to them for the new year.

 

[Kinokohatake]

Because we Americans are stupid.

That's not sarcasm; I'm dead fucking serious. Why else would we try to impose our rights and beliefs on other sections of the world? We're a bunch of fucking idiots who ultimately can't stand the fact that there are people who aren't cut from the same cloth.

Oh yes I forgot that every other country except the US is open and free to everyone. Forget France kicking out the gypsies, or the Italian soccer game a few years ago where everytime the black player got the ball, the stadium started to make monkey noises, or hell even the subject of the thread.

Americans aren't being different to be different. We developed our own style of things. Thats it. Period. We didn't all sit down as a country 200 years ago and say "Fuck the world, we are special so we will do what we want.

Oh and England didn't give the colonies back. They cut their losses after getting their asses handed to them.

 

[Davey Woo]

I believe it's because the British (and probably others) say the date:
The 1st of January 2011.
01/01/11
DD/MM/YY

Whereas the Americans say:
January the 1st, 2011.
01/01/11
MM/DD/YY

Therefore we do our short dates in the same way. (Really bad date to try and show the difference isn't it?) XD

 

[logiman]

I fucking hate it when I see a date on the internet like "9.8.2002" or w/e.
What`s so hard to spell the fucking month? "June 1st 1999"?
At least that`s how we do it in my country and so there is no more cofusion..

 

[Ranma12569]

We just do. And to send it right back at ya, why do all of you Europeans and Asians drive on the left side of the road, huh? That's so silly.

Nah, just England and Japan. Two isolated islands. =P

England isn't an island it's a country along with Scotland and Wales that make up the island of great britain which contains numerous small islands as well.

Japan is several thousand islands not just one. I'm not attacking you just letting you know

 

[Twilight_guy]

Look it up on wikipedia. No seriously, go now. [a src="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date"]Now, Fo![/a]

 

[Rockchimp69]

We just do. And to send it right back at ya, why do all of you Europeans and Asians drive on the left side of the road, huh? That's so silly.

Nah, just England and Japan. Two isolated islands. =P

What's silly about it? This isn't supposed to be a thread where people just complain about other cultures being different. I was just wondering what the logic behind it was because I couldn't identify it.

So there. Have your "Go America!" picture, have your date system. I'll have my date system, and I'll just make jokes about England just being mad that they lost all their colonies. Compromise?

We didn't lose them really... we gave them back. Just as silly, if I'm honest. Haha

Good point, although you did out and out lose America.

I really want to make a Canada joke here, but I promised I'd be nice to them for the new year.

Personally I don't really care about "losing" or "giving away" colonies, because one day Earth will be completely united anyway and when that happens it won't be under any one country's flag.

Look it up on wikipedia. No seriously, go now. [a src="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date"]Now, Fo![/a]

No, because there's no discussion value on wikipedia. One person will have an idea about it and write it and then someone else will come along and replace it with their own idea.
You'd know this if you had read my OP.

 

[Xojins]

I think the more important question is who cares?

 

[Cowabungaa]

I think the more important question is who cares?

It made me think Uncharted 3 was going to release on the 1st of January instead of the 11th of November. It only did so for a few moments, but after realising the truth I was a saaaad saaaad panda.

I say down with that American nonsense!

 

[batterj2]

In one of my previous jobs I we had to work with American legislation alongside UK. In order to prevent confusion over this issue all dates had to be written as DD-MMM-YYYY e.g. 21-Jan-2011.

5 years later I still can't bring myself to using dd/mm/yy for that very reason!

 

[2fish]

It was a military tactic, that way when the redcoats found a letter they would expect the attack on the wrong day...duh.


I think this came down to some data keeping group like the accountants of government as stated somewhere above me. Those guys like to make all sorts of rules and changes.