I'd love to hear the logic of why Monday should be the first day of the week.
00-06 - night
06-12 - morning
12-18 - afternoon
18-24 - evening
Would need to refactor the name of "midnight" tho to minimize confusion. But if we use it as a starting point to count hours in a day from, it doesn't make sense to simultaneously designate it as a middle of anything.
(BTW, such subdivision is actually common in many places of the world.)
Anyway, to be a bit more substantive: What really baked my noodle when I was younger is the fact that the seasons and the night/day cycle are much more disconnected than it appears when you live on Earth. Of course, it makes sense when you understand the tilt/rotation thing, but still... it really weirds me out sometimes.
[0] English in this case, but any language, really.
This is what I was taught, I do indeed think it’s pretty silly, but it wouldn’t even be in the top 100 weirdest things about our language/culture/norms “space.” We’re surrounded by idiosyncrasies!
This would imply that a Weekend and a Weekbegin could easily coincide.
Not everyone, Israel has has Friday and Saturday off.
In the Bible it says God designated the last day of the week as a day of rest. From a Christian point of view, it would make sense that Sunday is the last day of the week, as it is the official day of rest. Otherwise they disrespect the Bible and skip the "real" day of rest.
I'm not religious or American, so from my relatively objective view it seems as if the people from the majority religion has ignored their holy book.
Consider the old nursery rhyme, Monday's Child, which ends with
Friday's child is loving and giving / Saturday's child works hard for a living. / And the child born on the Sabbath day Is bonny and blithe, good and gay.
Of course ISO 8601 didn't just drop out of thin air, but what caused it? I think it's a misunderstanding mixed with ignorance. Ignorance of the fact that the Jewish Sabbath, referred to everywhere in the Bible, is on Saturday, combined with people reading in the Ten Commandments about observing the Sabbath on the last day of the week and associating that with their own church attendance on Sunday, which they then conclude must be the last day of the week.
A more thorough reading of the Bible would have set them straight, as would some knowledge about history or other religions.
I actually used to think that Monday as the first day of the week was just a corporate thing. I first noticed it when I started working and work agendas were surprisingly insistent on starting on Monday. But I figured that was because the weekend is meaningless to the work week, so why not just lump it all together at the end? And then I learned about ISO 8601 and was completely flabbergasted that this was an official standard.
Depends on the Christian. If you mean the Puritans, from whom present-day prescriptions (such as no or limited alcohol sales on Sunday) derive, you may be on to something. If you mean the Sabbatarians, no doubt they have an explanation, but I don't know it. If you mean a Seventh-Day Adventist, you'd be wrong, because they still hold to Saturday as the seventh-day and the sabbath. If you mean a Catholic or one from another denomination, the Catholic catechism teaches that Sunday is the fulfillment of the spiritual truth of the Jewish sabbath, and most other denominations understand similarly.
http://web.archive.org/web/20190604142831/http://www.unixgui...
edit: lol, too slow
The recent official standardisation of Monday to be the first day of the week was a mistake.
And the months are numbered (January = "first month"),
Who are we to argue with the people who have finally gotten an act together to number it properly?[1]
[1]: alright, yes, Sunday is still the odd one out and doesn't have a number.
This also coincides with the work week where the first workday is Monday, then the weekend ends the week and a new week begins with Monday.