American Dates
Americans on the right, myself included, tend to bristle at conventions that seem more British than American—the metric system, swallowing the letters “T” and “H” like a Cockney, driving on the left-hand side of the road, upward inflection of sentences, and dispensing with articles before “hospital.”
(Aside: If you haven’t noticed, commensurate with the pandemic, no one under 40 pronounces the letter “T” when surrounded by vowels. They all pronounce “utilize” “yoo-ill-eyes,” for example. Horrible.)
But there’s one British convention we should adopt: date formatting, because our American formatting of dates is confusing, stupid, and illogical.
Here is today’s date in American: February 21, 2024. Can you see what’s wrong? If not, think logically.
Logic requires that a series of values with varying degrees of specificity be arranged either least-to-most specific or most-to-least specific. Never would a logical person jumble up specificity. You wouldn’t say “Eggs come in sets of a dozen, individually, or in cases of 36.” You would probably list the packages from the smallest (individual) to the largest (case). This gives the reader a mental sorting mechanism.
Speaking of sorting, think about tables of data. You can sort the data largest to smallest or smallest to largest, but I’ve never seen the option of sorting a column of data randomly. Or with the largest or highest value in the middle.
But that’s exactly how we in the United States arrange dates.
We lead off with the month, which is more specific than the year, but less specific than the date. Why? Who came up with that? Certainly, you would never write out a date that way. Look at a wedding invitation, for example:
Wednesday the twenty-first of February twenty twenty-four
Most specific, moderately specific, least specific.
An even better format is the inverse: least- to most-specific. Leading with the year, followed by the month, then the day takes the reader or listener on a logical journey his mind’s eye can see.
Formatted as numbers (2024-02-21), you can sort such dates as strings without converting to dates, and you can do math on them:
2024-02-21 - 2013-03-12 =
21 - 12 = 09
02 - 03 = -1 month, which we borrow from the year, to make 12 - 1 = 11
2024 (-1) - 2013 = 10
to arrive at 10 years, 11 months, and 9 days
Take the sentence: “country, region, state, city, neighborhood, street, house, room, furniture, desk—and on the desk lay a gun, a Beretta nine millimeter with a silencer and a trigger worn from extensive use.” We feel swept along on a journey to find the murder weapon. Imagine the same sentence (or fragment) in random order:
“Silencer, city, trigger, state, house, desk, room, country, Beretta nine millimeter with a silencer and a trigger worn from extensive use, and region.” In the logical order, we imagine a detective tracking down the missing piece of evidence in an international caper. In the latter, we imagine untreated schizophrenia.
Much like the American system of formatting dates.
Regardless of the outcome of elections, please, for the sake of logic, let’s fix our date formatting once and for all.