America Has Two Feet. It’s About to Lose One of Them
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
They standardized the whole country on something because they had to - too much people from different places came together, each with their own measurement system.
The rest of the world standardized later. I assume the overhead from conversion only became unbearable when some level of commerce between different nations was reached. When they standardized, they had better science available.
So now there are 2 landmasses, each big and integrated enough to have internal units, not feel too much pain from using a different kind of units. Everything goes reasonably well, unless they meet.
Stuff like this really isn't a big deal. I don't get why people get so hung up on it.
In the UK we'd say "18th [of] August, 2020"
If you ask someone what date Independence Day is they'll say July 4th, 1776. Not 4th of July, 1776. Test it.
> In the UK we'd say "18th [of] August, 2020"
Cool. In the US we say August 18th, 2020. So that's why we do MM/DD/YYYY. If you have any American colleagues or friends you can text this by asking them what the date is. They'll say August 18th (maybe with the 2020 part depending on how specific they want to be).
I really don't understand why people are so hell bent on changing our culture. We do it this way and like it. It's not a big deal.
Non-US people don’t like it because it’s (a) different, and (b) illogical. If it were different and logical (ie: the numbers were in some hierarchical sequence), there’d be a lot less criticism of it, IMHO.
> Non-US people don’t like it because it’s (a) different
K. Well, respect different cultures. In the US we like to do it this way because that's how we say it.
> and (b) illogical
Who cares besides Europeans with nothing better to do with their vacation time? Humans aren't computers.
A less conspicuous date might work better. "When's Valentine's Day?" or "When's St. Patrick's Day?" (Feb 14th and Mar 17th, respectively).
Eh, that's not very compelling. You have a specific event for which you break your date ordering just because? "It's an event" doesn't explain why the ordering is suddenly not the standard.
It looks like a holdover from a prior point in history before there was the current trend of spoken date endianness. Look at "Seventh of March speech" as another example.
> Cool. In the US we say August 18th, 2020. So that's why we do MM/DD/YYYY.
This isn't actually the case from what I can tell by looking online, both England and the english speaking north Americans used a mixture of MM/DD/YYYY (but only with written out months) and DD/MM/YYYY. Once there was a move toward number-only dates around 1900 England disposed of middle endian dates and the US preserved them.
> I really don't understand why people are so hell bent on changing our culture. We do it this way and like it. It's not a big deal.
Global communication, US is the only place using this date format, can be mis-parsed for the first 12 days of every month, not even consistent within itself etc.
You're defending it with as much gusto as people in other places care. It's a minor annoyance to convert ambiguous dates, that's pretty much it.
e.g. le dix-huit août, deux mille vingt
I’ve just about gotten to grips with fuel expressed in litres. I suspect it was only changed to make the unit price look cheaper from a distance.