As of March 11th I can drink in the USA. Nobody trusts my ID, however, since us UK folk do the dates the logical way round (day/month/year)... good thing my passport says March on it. I was not born in November
dd/mm/yy is perfectly logical, it's in ascending order of length (a day is shorter than a month, a month is shorter than a year). Then again, yy/mm/dd would be just as logical. mm/dd/yy is just weird.
I like mm/dd/yy because right off the bat you know what part of the year you're in. Saying it makes sense because of length of interval seems more like OCD than logic. But it really is arbitrary and unimportant. You could think of a number of reasons for either case.
But really, I don't think it's important. I think it's more interesting and worthwhile to note that dd/mm/yy came from the old tradition of "The 24th day of March in the year of our Lord 2001" I love trivia! \/
I think it's important because when I hear Americans talking about 9/11 I think "what happened on the 9th of November?"
At least our attack is symmetrical. Which is, after public safety of course, is all that matters.
Maybe important to international matters, but here? O_o
The mm/dd/yy seems logical to me because I think of the years as a suffix rather than part of the date. We say, "March 17th, 2009" so we transpose that into 3/17/09. If I say "March 17th" (Dunno if that's how you'd say it in the UK, maybe you'd say "the 17th of March") it makes more sense to me to put 3/17 not only because it matches the way we say it with words, but it starts with the more general level, the month, like a prefix, and then gives the specific date. And then you say the year on the end. Getting less "specific" as you go doesn't seem logical to me.
It's mostly that we were raised with certain systems. I see logic in both but prefer the US system for the reason above. And remember, I don't latch on to these just for the sake of being stubborn. I think the foot/yard/mile measurement system is absurd and that we should jump ship from AM-PM.
Just one more note on it, OMC. I prefer the old UK way of DD/MM/YY, mostly because i'm used to it but logically it follows the rule of days<months<years. However, if this is the case why do we all still tell the time using HH:MM?
The mm/dd/yy seems logical to me because I think of the years as a suffix rather than part of the date. We say, "March 17th, 2009" so we transpose that into 3/17/09.
I think the whole 'logical' part is just what we were brought up to use. If everyone in the world used a universal standard format, we wouldn't be having this conversation. And we would be on topic.
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dd/mm/yy
Edited by X_Sheep
You could think of a number of reasons for either case.
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