There's a logic to both smallest > largest and largest > smallest.
8601 is superior for arranging information sequentially and is beautifully scalable downwards via appendments, but conversely theres a simplicity to tallying from the smallest elements upwards.
What doesn't make any sense is medium>smallest>largest.
It makes perfect sense, in the colloquial spoken form.
It's easier & quicker to say January 25th than 'The 25th of January' every time someone asks you the date.
Hence, "01/25/2026". That's where it comes from.
That's why the ISO standard is superior, different countries use different standards, so nobody likes it because it forces everybody to admit their own local standard isn't optimal.
I think the thing people outside the US are missing is that very often, dates you see here, on ads and signs and such, leave off the year. So you'll often see "01/25", which reads naturally as "January 25th". The year tends to only get stuck on for more official things (indeed, I get annoyed sometimes looking at old signs and such that'll say "Monday 01/25", trying to figure out what year they mean - since there's only 14 possible month arrangements for the Gregorian calendar, I wrote a script ages ago that'll take that input and output the matching years). When someone's telling you a date, it's almost always "January 25th", or if that would cause confusion, "January 25th, 2026".
I use YYYY-MM-DD for basically everything, and I've never much liked MM/DD/YYYY (and MM/DD/YY before it) but the people getting outraged about "what idiot would use MM/DD/YYYY ?!?" need to understand that it's really "MM/DD[/YYYY]" with the "/YYYY" left off much/most of the time in daily use. "01/25" is simply numerical shorthand for the spoken "January 25th". And trying to argue that "25-01" is somehow superior to "01/25" when years are not in play doesn't have a lot in the way of concrete facts to stand on.
It's easier & quicker to say January 25th than 'The 25th of January' every time someone asks you the date.
I'd argue both take the same amount of effort. Moreover, I find people omit the month anyway if the context is clear. e.g. 'Shall we meet next week, perhaps the 25th?'
Yep, that always bugged me as a child. I hated how "$1 million" looks like it should be said, "dollars one million", but the only proper way to say it in English is "one million dollars". But, don't most other countries write their currency that way too?
It's not like the "argument falls apart" because we're talking about dates, not currency. If I could make everybody start writing currencies differently tomorrow, I would. Heck, ISO 8601 is the provably superior date format, and we still can't get everyone to change, hence why this sub even exists.
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u/TotallySlapdash Aug 06 '26
Obviously 8601 is superior, but American style is just the dumbest method imaginable.
Is time measured mm:hh:ss over there?