Asklemmy

Why do Americans use MM/DD/YY for date, but not mm:ss:hh for time? Doesn’t that make the same amount of sense?

Probably because in english it's the way they speak about dates (and the fact US kinda isolated themselves before WWII).

They started to write dates as they speak dates.

It's not just Americans. There are many countries in Asia where the default is year month day. If you ever had to organize files by name and date this is the supreme sorting order. Both Europe and North America are getting it wrong.

If this gets you mad don't ever look into how the French count from 80 to 99. Or how languages disagree on what's blue or green. These things happen.

Hello, have you heard the good word of our lord, ISO-8601?

It comes down to the variable weather in the US versus the UK.

The UK has maybe handful of weeks of actual hot weather, months and months of rain, and then some weeks of bitter cold. The day is more important than the month who cares if it’s March or September? It’s another day of rain and grey.

The US has extreme weather changes across the year, especially in the northeast where differences in US and UK English first began to diverge, intentionally and unintentionally. In a state like Massachusetts, knowing the month is important for things like setting the scene in letters “home” and so forth. The summer months and grossly hot. The fall/autumn is full of brilliant colors and mild weather followed by months of bitter, unrelenting cold winter. The spring months yield to green and mild weather again. Knowing that the month is April is very important because the 4th of April is going to be incredibly different from the 4th of September.

Source: Link

Idk, maybe like all U.Sians traditions, this was an Old-World British thing Americans preserved, since it's a more direct term of the English language, more direct than Day then Month

so unless it's a special day, if not holiday, for U.Sians like 4th of July, by default, Month then Day

Generally we say June 1, not 1 June or 1st of June... So 6/1 makes complete sense.

For anything "official", like a work spreadsheet, I'll use ISO format YYYY-MM-DD for clarity and ease of filtering/sorting.

My guess is the month is most relevant to an agrarian society. It tells you where you are in the growing cycle that the entire culture revolves around. The day and year offer little practical utility to a 19th century farmer.

I don't have a clue why we do MM-DD-YYYY and personally I hate how dates are done in the west, to a degree.

For a maths course I've been taking at college, I never use MM-DD in my notebook because that and DD-MM are stupid in my opinion. I always spell out the month first to ensure I don't get mixed up. I honestly envy that some languages like Chinese and Japanese have an individual character to help distinguish between month and day.

Also, I would love if every country using the MM-DD or vice versa format could all agree on which format to use for everyday things.

Because Star Wars day sounds better when you say “May the Fourth be with you”. That said, I could be convinced to switch to Yoda-style “With you, the Fourth May be”.

I don't know, that's just how I learned it in school so it feels natural for me to use/say.

This post kinda stinks of "why doesn't the US just switch to metric? Are they stupid?"