this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
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[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (53 children)

I really wonder how americans were able to fuck this one up. There are three ways to arrange these and two of them are acceptable!

Edit: Yes, I meant common ways, not combinatorically possible ways.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (15 children)

It's how the dates are typically said, here. November 6th, 2020 = 11/6/2020. [Edit: I had written 9 instead of 11 for November.] (We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.) It's easy to use, but I agree that YYYY-MM-DD is vastly superior for organization.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.

When is your independence day, again?

Anyway, in Australia (and, I suspect, other places that use DD/MM/YYYY) we use "{ordinal} of {month}" (11th of August), "{ordinal} {month}" (11th August), and "{month} {ordinal}" (August 11th) pretty much interchangeably. In writing but not in speaking, we also sometimes use "{number} {month}" (11 August). That doesn't have any bearing on how we write it short form though, because those are different things. It's not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When is your independence day, again?

July 4th, why?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Fourth of July" is the name of the holiday. It happens on "July 4th".

"Independence Day" was a movie in the 90's. We never say "Independence Day" around here unless the topic is Will Smith or REM.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see this weird argumentation every time the dating system comes up 🙄

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's kinda tongue in cheek, but that's how we say things in my part of the US. "Fourth of July" is spoken of exactly as if it were the name of the day, like "Thanksgiving" or "Christmas". Just like we still refer to "Cinco de Mayo" even though we don't speak Spanish.

Obviously it's not really called "Fourth of July", but nobody ever says "Nth of Month" here otherwise. And I'm kinda grateful as I like "bigger to smaller" notation. Yeah, mm/dd/yyyy sucks, but saying it that way is pretty expressive because the year rarely matters. So it's like "Hours and minutes" or (yeah, sorry Europeans) Feet and inches. Bigger before smaller quickly expresses precise information to our caveman brains. At least to my caveman brain.

Also, the movie really wasn't that good in retrospect, but we had some sort of fever about it because it was expensive with lots of explosions, and good music licensing. And both patriots and antipatriots had something to get out of it because aliens blew up the White House.

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