why does america write the date wrong and why don’t they feel bad about it.
I suspect animate-mush knows the real reason, she knows everything, really. But personally, I think it’s because of the way we say the date. We say “April twentieth, two-thousand fifteen“ not “twentieth April…”. Which isn’t to say that we never say it that way. But it’s rare. So, we write it 4/20/15. Because that’s how we say it.
I actually don’t know why, but if I had to speculate I’d say it either just happened to be codified differently in two different places and times with no particular communication between them OR it was a deliberate choice by Noah Webster et al. to distinguish us from Britain enacted at the same time as all the other spelling reforms.
The botanist I worked for actually didn’t let us write number/number/number for dates because you could never be sure which convention the collector was using. I will use the American convention when I do number/number/number, but if I write out the month I will typically put the date first, because having letters separate the two groups of numbers is more aesthetically pleasing to me, and also then I don’t have to write the little superscripts. But then, I also cross my sevens and my <z> s, and I used to cross my zeroes as well, so I do have a number of European conventions in my handwriting anyway, picked up from my mother, who picked them up from her mother, who was Italian and came by them naturally. But it was really sloppy physics writing that made me cross my zs so as to distinguish them from 2s.
So the short answer after all of that anecdotal rambling is I really have no idea, but I would expect that any appeal to either order being more “natural” or “logical” is just plain wrong.
When I sign things or name folders of photos or otherwise can choose, I say 2015 Apr 20 (spacing/abbreviations vary). Otherwise MLA.
I like “Written on this the twentieth day of April in the Year of Our Lord MMXV.“ Preferably attached to something as inconsequential as possible, like a cat photo.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #look dates are very important to me okay #(tagging it that because that’s what I tagged the last thing about date ambiguity)
Brinens and Things 