Today is the 18th day of the second month of 2017 (unless of course, you are reading this in the future, in which case, how long did you have to wait for hover-skateboards and what do teleporters feel like, and does anybody in the future remember those couple of months when American had President Trump?).
Most people will say that today's date is "The 18th of February 2017" and will sign documents with digits 18/2/17, or 18/02/17 (or if in America, the even more horrible 02/18/17). The problem is of course the confusion here as to what the digits mean. Is it the 18th day, or the 2nd day, or the 17th day of the 18th month of year 2....?
When you stop to think about it, writing dates in either British or American formats is deeply confusing and fundamentally illogical.
Much better to write the date as 2017-02-18.
That's YYYY-MM-DD.
There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, documents date stamped in this way will automatically be sorted into chronological order. Someone sent me a document today from a recent meeting. The filename was DD MM YY. I can only imagine what a mess their 'my documents' folder looks like. Perhaps they like having all files written on the first day of every month next to each other? Or maybe they are The Doctor, from Doctor Who? You see, time is not a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey 'stuff'. It is a strict line.
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| Fun, but wrong! |
2017-02-18 11:47:12
Notice that the largest unit of time is on the left. As you move through the digits, the units of time become progressively smaller, from years to months to days to hours to minutes.
Is there anywhere else that we also apply this logic? Consider the number "three hundred and forty nine".
It would seem logical to write this as "349", with the largest unit on the left, getting progressively smaller. It would be very silly to write it as "493", or even "49 and 300", or "four hundred minus fifty-one".
How about your postal address? You probably also write it in order of size:
Little person
Some house
A Street
In a little town
County
Country
Your massive planet
Of course, I am only talking about written dates here. I think it is perfectly acceptable to say "Saturday the eighteenth of February", or "it is nearly ten past two" in spoken English.
In fact, you shouldn't be surprised to discover that there is an international standard for date formats (and it makes incredible sense to adopt it all in written documents). It is basically what I have been banging on about in this rant.
No longer should you accept the problem of interpreting a date written as 04/05/11 as being the fifth of April in the late Roman period, or possibly the eleventh of May, or possibly April, in, um, in year 4, or maybe 5. Oh, my brain!
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| Right now! I mean, just then....no, it's gone. |
If you enjoyed this rant, then you probably want to take a long hard look at yourself, however you might also like to read about why Americans drive on the wrong side of the road or perhaps you would like these articles about calendars.
See you for some more nerdy stuff in the future......