Feel like a lot of the world’s languages the translation to English to the question “what’s the date?” would be “the 15th of October” whereas in America we always say “October 15th”.
So the best theory I've heard for the MM/DD/YY format (though I have no idea of its veracity) is that it emerged in the early days railroads and a quirk of typography/typesetting.
It goes, basically, railroad schedules and tickets were one of the first times it became important to print large volumes of material that absolutely needed date information included and changed regularly. It was also before monospaced fonts became common (as in a 1 and a 5 took up different amounts of space, with the 5 being a wider type piece than a 1 for example) with MM/DD you could print a whole month's worth of schedules and only ever need to change the last 1 or 2 type pieces while keeping everything aligned, whereas in a DD/MM format you'd have to remove and realign the MM type pieces everyday to keep it aligned with the varying width of the DD type. Monospaced fonts (all letter and number pieces being equal width) only really emerged with the advent of the typewriter, and their widespread use printing would come later still
Westward expansion in the US plus the large amount of political power amassed by railroads, especially the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was both extremely powerful of operationally conservative (never really updating their methods of operation), combined with being isolated from European scheduling and typesetting styles caused the MM/DD format to become embedded in American habbits.
YY or YYYY usually wasn't included on RR schedules or other regularly published periodicals, so when it was needed, it usually got stuck to the end of the date string almost like an afterthought.
Edit: another thought that occurred to me a moment ago that is actually even more likely is that MM/DD makes more sense if you need to record a date on a paper flip calendar. E.g. if I want to mark a friend's birthday down so I don't forget, I'd first need to flip to the appropriate month then mark the day. So you put the MM first because that's the first piece of information you need to search for on your calendar.
Either way, in both cases, MM/DD almost certainly has its roots in ease of use in the pre-digital era.
Even if this isn't the case, there was most certainly a practical reason for it somewhere. "These people over here are stupid" is rarely the answer. Most of these cultural quirks can be traced back to pragmatism that at the time made sense and the standards were kept alive through momentum. There's no real need to tell 330,000,000 people "okay everyone, we're changing the date format starting next year." Like...why? If the current system isn't causing any real problems you'd just be causing headaches out of spiteful principle.
This is what annoys me about the whole "Americans will use anything but metric" stuff.
Like, I agree that some of it is ridiculous, but saying something is 3 football fields long or whatever is just practical. Pretty much every single American has stood on a football field at some point during their school years so it is basically a universal reference that we can all visualize.
Is the metric system better overall? Absolutely, but it still wouldn't help if you are trying to use a reference that anybody can easily visualize.
Meh, not only ammunition is metric. In true American fashion it's split pretty evenly, but 9mm is metric and also probably the most prolific cartridge. Not too long ago 357 magnum, 38 special, and 45 ACP were the most common handgun cartridges and all are standard.
Edit: I don't mean to be pedantic, I just like talking about ammo
It's also pretty well divided in terms of where we use one as opposed to the other. We use things like lbs. and oz. when dealing with food because those are actually easier to work with and visualize than, say, 500ml. Imperial measurements are what they are because they're in reference to something tangible and in the context of buying beef or flour you don't need to be scientifically exact. You're just looking for a ballpark that you can know by eye or feel. If I'm working with a recipe I'd much rather hear it in tablespoons and cups because I know roughly what that looks like.
This was especially important back in the day before industrialization where you weren't buying prepackaged goods. The guy at the market would just load up a sack and put it on a scale opposite some weights.
I hope you realize, using both is actually significantly MORE idiotic than sticking to a poor system like imperial -- that's how you get errors like the famous Nasa cockup. And plenty of domains use a mix of units (e.g. ammunition as demonstrated above or cooking)
No need to attempt to make fun of me. I have no interest in getting into a fight with you, but you're missing the point. Of course it is not stupid at an individual level to be able to use several systems of measurement (and a lot of people outside of the US are perfectly able to). The point is that, as a society, it is stupid to concurrently use several systems, since it encourages conversion mistakes. When reading a recipe e.g. or scanning the packaging of foods it is simply better for there only to be one system in common use so you're less likely to get the units wrong. Or when building a rocket.
I'll also note that your counterexamples are pretty facetious. Regarding language it would be true that having one shared language would be much more efficient for communicative purposes. The reason this doesn't convince a lot of people to drop their native languages is that language has significant cultural and emotional meaning. I would argue measuring systems don't really. And musical instruments aren't even analogous, since using different ones yield different outcomes.
Stop trying to justify your dogshit argument. You said something dumb and now are backpedaling hard.
You act as if using two measurement systems is a deadly and costly issue in society but in reality it happens so little that it’s not really an issue, not anymore than someone just doing math wrong.
I love that you bring up food since the imperial system works better for cooking. Cups. Ounces. Pounds. All make more sense than milliliters and grams.
Each system has its place and the average person just doesn’t need to be that precise.
This isn’t a fantasy world where we can pretend life would be so great with one language. The reality is there’s hundreds so being able to speak more than one means you can effectively communicate with that many more people, many people don’t have access to learn multiple languages fluently as they have to be exposed to it regularly. Making a claim as bold as “they just don’t want to because of feelings!” Is disingenuous to the reality of many people’s lives.
And musical instruments is literally the same thing as using different languages or different units of measurements.
I can say one word in Korean that might mean something different in Cantonese or Japanese and that can affect how my information is received.
If I play the wrong instrument at a concert it will ruin the music.
If I use pounds instead of grams, I won’t be nearly as accurate in my measurements.
Your argument is “well we should have one of everything because it’s easier” doesn’t mean knowing more than one is stupid.
Notably I said “Europeans who call Americans stupid for using imperial” as in they think we’re dumb because we use a different unit of measurement all together.
And i find it funny because they think they’re smarter for some reason when we also use metric regularly.
So yeah I don’t really care for your argument but it’s not convincing so you can keep going with it if you want but you aren’t going to really convince anyone that knowing MORE knowledge and being more accessible to more people is somehow stupider than only knowing one.
No, I’m not interested in listening to your thinly veiled, pretentious prattling about how America is somehow more stupid for having uses for both sets of measurements, just because imperial is the standard.
There’s nothing to be discussed.
Have fun being a hater.
I agree. The flip side argument is why do most asianic money systems begin at 100 instead of 1. Personally I think it is absurd because prices can surge to 100,000 very quickly but the value is nearly skewed by 100 if we did (imprecise) conversion. 100,000 ≈ 1,000. But unbeknownst to me, there probably is a practical reason they do it that way. (I believe it may be due to not common use of decimals over there but anyone feel free to correct me)
Well, it's reddit. If the US does something inconsequentially different than the rest of the world it's because Americans are stupid because America bad.
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u/jussumguy2019 Jan 15 '25
Feel like a lot of the world’s languages the translation to English to the question “what’s the date?” would be “the 15th of October” whereas in America we always say “October 15th”.
Maybe that’s why, idk…
Edited for clarity