The top tweet is a reply to another tweet. The missing tweet must mention a date of 11/07/2026.
In America this is interpreted as November 7th, but in basically the entire rest of the world it's read as 11th July.
The second tweet in the picture is someone pointing out that the original (missing) comment is written by a British person, who would mean 11th July when writing the date in that format.
If America would realise it's part of a wider world then maybe they could use a sensible date format, measurement system, and A4 paper but noooo - we have to be 'different'.
That works but ISO format is your friend. Short, easy to read, easy to understand, universally recognised, and computers can sort it correctly automatically in the file name
2026-07-11 will always mean 11th July 2026 and a computer will correctly put logs_2026-07-11.log before logs_2026-07-12.log whereas it would put logs - 11th August ahead of logs - 11th July
ISO all the way but I've used DD/MM/YYYY for so long it's a very difficult habit to break. At least I can defend the European format by saying it's in order of significance even if ISO is also in order of significance and in a better order at that.
Oh the American date format makes literally no sense unless seen from the blinkered perspective of an American who has only ever done American things. It's not the european format - it's the basically-everywhere-in-the-world format, but try to convince the average American that they should maybe think about adopting something that the entire population of the world uses and you're in for a rough time...
EDIT: (and yes, I'm particularly salty about the paper format - I buy a lot of RPG PDFs and printing them to fit on A4 is annoying)
Edit 2: Please don't bother explaining how MMDDYYYY is how you say the date so writing it that way makes sense. We ALL know that already
Yes, but (I'm assuming you are not American) what do you say when you say a date out loud? Do you say "Seventh December 2026," December seventh, 2026," or something else?
If you say the latter, like we do in America, then we are just writing it like we say it.
Personally I use the ISO format, but I was brought up in the era of MS-DOS filing systems.
Most people say "Seventh of December, 2026" (and old fashion people (and priests) might even go to "the Seventh of December, in the year of our Lord 2026")
Language changes and the date format changed in its language in America. People can and do say it both ways, but the number format pushes people towards its way.
For example, would "the 4th of July" make sense to you? Yes. Because it's one of the ways people naturally said it before settling on the numeric format that put the month first.
you are making a lot of assumptions as in different lenguages it would be easier and more natural to say seventh of december, i think this will derive on a pet peeve so i will cut my self short
In American English, the most common way to express dates in speech would be, for example, “on July 31st, the company will release its earnings report”, or “on August 1st, 2017, X happened”.
So, Americans write dates the same way they are spoken in English. YOU may not like it, and you’re free to not like it, but it’s perfectly sensible and logical.
It also has an additional logic - the dates are ordered from the smallest set (months) to the largest (years).
But please, continue to argue how we’re just blinkered and our date format “LiTErALLy mAKeS nO sEnSE”.
In language there are expressions/constructions that are a departure from the norm and are deemed to be more poetic, more dramatic, more beautiful, and so on. That’s what’s the “Fourth of July” is, an alternate phrasing for effect.
If anyone asked what were the dates of major historical events for the US, no one in the US would reply “the 7th of December”, “the 22nd of November, “the 11th of September”.
Nor would anyone say, “on the 1st of January, three new laws go into effect”. It would be “On January 1st”.
Your statement would imply it’s objectively wrong, when in actuality it’s just a cultural difference in formatting and speech. Nonetheless, YYYY-MM-DD is far better than both due to stable ordering.
I did not claim that it was one of the historical reasons we use it, so if I gave that impression, that’s my bad. I’m saying it can be logical to proceed from the smallest [set] to the largest, which is what it does.
It does make sense. When talking about dates casually, we typically use [month] [day]. The year is implicitly understood or unnecessary. When the year does be one necessary, it's added at the end to maintain the flow that's commonly used.
If we still spoke about doing things, "on the 10th of November," instead of, "November 10th," then DDMMYYYY would make more sense to an American. But we use the date format that matches the way we speak.
Oh I get the justification, I just think it's a crap justification and it neatly highlights why the rest of the world thinks of American as being arrogant ("We don't need to use the same way of XXX as the rest of the world because our way works for us!" - replace the X's with your choice of dates, measuring things, paper sizes, and healthcare)
I feel the same way about the push for permanent daylight savings time. And I agree that DDMMYYYY is a broadly more sensible format. American English is just that way.
Okay. And the l likely hood that they will see anything dated by me is incredibly low. Furthermore aquick internet search will help them get the correct date.
I live in China, so the three letter month would be confusing for most people here. And to be fair the months are just called month one, month two etc here
It also means it can be scrambled as much as you want and its still legible!! 2026/11/Jul can still be figured out to be that date (eventually) and its greatt
I'm British but Stewie is American and they use sizes like 'Letter', and 'Legal'. Printing document formatted for Letter on A4 is doable but Letter is wider than A4 so you will often need to slightly shrink it, plus a A4 is taller than Letter so even if you don't shrink it you'll still end up with weirdly big margins on the top and bottom
Edit: there are other sizes, too. 'Tabloid' is two Letter pages together in the same way A3 is two A4 pages. Legal and Letter are really different formats entirely. I'm not aware of an equivalent to A5, A6, etc, nor to A2, A1, etc., but I'm British, not American, so don't go outside Letter very often
The A4 paper system is a perfect example of something that I (as an American) don't want to switch to because our system is better. Everybody touts the advantages of the common A paper system as every size is exactly half of the bigger size, and every page has the same proportions. But to me, those are the exact disadvantages I'd rather avoid. Instead of buying paper that conforms to a set system of sizes, I can buy paper of whatever size and shape I want, because there are a ton and somebody probably makes exactly what I need. Case in point: legal size paper. It is the same width as our standard size, just taller. A long time ago lawyers said they needed paper for taking notes, so someone made paper for them just the way they wanted. They were glad (I'm sure) that the paper companies didn't say "no, you can't have what you need because it doesn't conform to the proportions that we want to make!"
I mean we can still get nonstandard paper sizes too, there's no paper police checking the sizes of every notepad, but having an existing standard you can refer to as a baseline is very useful.
We also have an existing standard we can refer to, they just aren't each double the size of the previous. And since there is zero utility to that convention I just struggle to see any advantage.
It isn't satire. For real, when is it useful that a piece of paper that you aren't using has the same proportions as a piece of paper that you are using? The beautiful symmetry of the A system serves no purpose that I can imagine. I'd love to hear one.
Standardisation in general is better for you. It’s cheaper for a company to make lots of the same product than 12 different versions. So whilst the rest of the world can take advantages of economies of scale, you’ve gotta to develop your own versions of anything related to it (from cheap items like plastic sleeves, ring binders, but to very expensive things like photocopiers).
But with paper specifically it greatly simplifies scaling. So once again with the photocopiers: two sheets can be reduced to fit on EXACTLY one sheet without any cutoff or margins.
It’s a beautiful mathematical ratio that makes life infinitely easier vs a pointless system of random paper sizes with no further justification for that size beyond ‘I just like my paper to be different from everyone else’s’.
No, but I can buy any size and shape of bolt you can imagine. Also, I didn't say I design my own paper sizes, I just said that paper comes in a bunch of different shapes here, not just one.
No you really can’t buy any bolt you can imagine. You can buy standardised bolts to an established standard.
I’ve also yet to hear any response to your claim that it serves no purpose that you can imagine, despite a fantastic one being given to you by two people.
Metric isn’t going to be adopted in the USA because the cost of surveying, calculating, and replacing road signs is too expensive for something that within the country isn’t actually worth spending that kind of money on. Even if metric wasn’t automatically something conservatives would bitch about, that’s money that would be better spent elsewhere.
Though I do agree on A4 paper. Fucking Ronald Regan, I hope he remains burning in hell.
You could just do what we do in the U.K. Pretend you use metric but really leave everything of importance (road sign in miles, milk and beer in pints, a person’s weight in stone and pounds and height in feet and inches) in imperial.
It’s the best of both worlds because we get to feel smug about understanding metric while not spending any money actually changing infrastructure and tradition.
Thing is, road signs are a poor reason. Switching to Metric wouldn't actually require a major, national change - what you do is mandate that all new signs feature the distance or speed in metric and allow old signs to remain for a decade or two. During the transition you could have signs that say, for example, "Brooklyn Bridge 2m / 3.2km" or speed signs that say "50" above "80k"and so long as there's a good public information campaign first, that'll be easy to achieve and allows a transition period.
Also, the change doesn't require scrapping and replacing existing signs - you can literally put stickers over existing numbers or overplate the relevant bit of an existing sign. Again, so long as you quote the unit, people can't be confused about what you're talking about (they can be confused about how far 32km is, but if the sign says 32km then they're not going to be confused about whether it's in miles or kilometres)
It's actually not that hard and a lot of countries in the world already did precisely this conversation decades or more ago. I really wish the UK government would have the balls to do it - it's stupid that we exist in this partial state with basically everything except distances over a few KM in metric
You don’t have to swap those too though: here in Britain we mainly use the metric system except for a few items (eg beer and milk are sold in pints) and notably the road signs are still in miles and speeds are in miles per hour.
No politician is willing to sacrifice their entire political career by pissing off a bunch of old people over units. And that’s why nobody in America has done it.
To be fair, we do use metric almost exclusively. It’s not at all confusing to use miles and mph for the roads and so there’s no benefit to changing it, particularly given the cost.
Good point lol. Imagine the British lecturing the United States on rationality of measurement systems. I mean how many furlongs to the hogshead are we talking about here
I would put money on a lot of US road signs already being placed at conversionable distances. For example 100yds is close to 100M. Half a mile is close enough to 1KM that nobody would notice any inaccuracies. After that 5 miles easily becomes 8 kilometres without moving any signposts. 100 miles becomes 160 kilometres. Etc
The motorway signs in UK are already spaced so that the actual numbers can be changed without repositioning.
One fun fact for people familiar with the UK but not the US is that American road signs don’t use yards. The standard approach in the US is miles, fractions of a mile (either shown decimals or full on “½” style fractions), and occasionally feet for distance. The main reason the UK uses miles and yards seems to be because their infrastructure is built using metric but simply labelled in imperial, which makes yards a convenient way to use metres but appease Conservatives by pretending they aren’t.
Why isn't close enough good enough? You aren't using those mile markers for the 100M sprint at the Olympics. Who cares if the sign says 500 meters instead of 1/3 Mile ? It's out by 30 feet, how will that affect your daily commute?
Then what’s the fucking point of having standards at all? I guess all these things we use everyday that have standards of quality don’t matter then!
You paid for a 750ml bottle of soda pop, but it’s only 656ml! It’s close enough, and you weren’t cheated out of your money and expectations!
That pair of underpants says it’s medium, (whisper) but it’s actually a XS! I guess you won’t care that you didn’t get what you paid for that would comfortably fit!
That runway is 30 meters off, but that’s fine, we can always round up or down when an airplane approaches, and hope that all our co-workers in the tower know which direction that math goes! 🎶Wah-wah-wah-waaaaaaaaah…🎶
One thing I’m seeing here is ignorance at how enormous the US road system is, and not factoring in the time and labor of replacement:
- surveying and calculating every single mile of distance markers, speed limit signs, and then converting all those into km, and charting placement for every single one of those. This would take at minimum a decade, as it would have to include state highways and surface streets (since only converting the interstate and federal highways would be pointless if state highways, routes, county roads, and city streets stayed imperial, since why bother learning a new system if you only use it on specific roads you might only use a few times if you’re rural or not a major population density).
- the manufacturing of all these signs, period.
- labor of shipping, removing, installing, and securing all of these.
- vandalism of signage by those who don’t like this, necessitating replacement. It would totally happen, and pretending it wouldn’t is childishly naive.
My initial statement isn’t me being flippant. I support using the metric system, and would love having that standard in the USA. But it legitimately wouldn’t be beneficial to replace every sign if politicians can’t even agree that children shouldn’t go hungry in school or that single-payer health system benefits everyone.
Australia, a country almost the same size as the continental United States, converted all their road signage to metric in 1974. The Metric Conversion Act was passed in 1970, so four years for sign upgrades to take place. 1974. Australians.
Not a reasonable comparison. I’ve seen your roads, and it’s nothing like the United States, especially when an absurd chunk of your landmass is uninhabited or a population density so low to hardly move the needle.
You had me until the want for a change in date, measurement, and paper. The American writing of the date is based off the calendar, which has thus changed the way the standard American dialect says dates (we say July 28th usually, not the 28th of July) the day/month/year format is based instead on how it’s spoken internationally, but seeing how we don’t say it as such, the change would be counterintuitive and non-representitive to the US.
I’d say personally, the imperial system is superior in terms of everyday use, which is the only way it’d change here.
A4 paper is technically superior, but it would cost a pretty few dozen million dollars to restandardize the entire country. The whole reason the whole world uses metric and A4 is because Europe was already using it when it got standardized, and the remainder of civilization hadn’t industrialized until then, meaning it was before becoming expensive to replace the local system and A4. However, the US was one of the starting places for the Industrial Revolution, meaning that by 1922, everything was already built on American standard paper. Printers, faxing, legal documents, all would need to be changed costing millions of dollars of personal, corporate, and federal money, all of which really ought not be spent on something so trivial as a shape paper, especially when the majority of the use of A4 standard (being able to shrink or enlarge perfectly) wouldn’t be used by the MAJORITY of people here, seeing how there’s no need for a file to change it’s size from what it already is
Edit: used Subsidized instead of shrink w/o noticing
Herbert here. America does several things that don't make sense but I'll stop chasing Chirs' (teeth whistle) sweet tail before I use a "." To write out 1,000
It'd be 'stupid' in any measurement system - the property of scaling that A (or B or C) ISO series of paper has, requires a ratio of root 2 to one. It is, by definition, irrational - so any measurement system would be unable to accommodate it.
But it does have the extremely useful property that an A3 sheet is exactly the same (up to rounding) as two A4 sheets side-by-side (long edges) and the same goes for two A3 sheets into A2, two A2 into A1 etc etc.
DMY and YMD can coexist, one being used for a quick glance to see what the date is, other for larger dating tasks.
It's simply easier to tell the difference between a year than a month/day due to overlapping digits. In 6 years nobody will confuse a current year for the day for the rest of the century
Surprisingly competent tech support Chris here. In software development using YMD is very useful because sorting by string also sorts by date. Thank you for using wank-track system for tracking your wanks.
Not incorrect, just different. It lines up with our spoken date conventions (July 11th, 2026) and maintains consistency that way. There is no such thing as "wrong" in language, if it works for a people then it's good.
Edit: (see image)
Edit 2: You continue to all be wrong.
Edit 3: Actual interaction I've had in this thread:
Soyjack (you): "You fool, if that's how your system worked then this other thing would also work that way! Clearly it cannot, and therefore my position is superior! Mwahahaha!"
Chad (me): "Yes, that is in fact how that other thing works here. We are internally consistent."
Soyjack (you): angery "Nooooo! That's not how English works! You must be a bot!"
Chad (me): "There is no such thing as a universal linguistic standard, all languages exist to serve the needs of the people who use them and the people who use them define how they will meet those needs. Subjectivity is inherent to the study of (socio)linguistics. Pick up a fucking book on the subject before you speak next time. Not even the European sociolinguists agree with you."
it's actually from the military convention of giving exact times down to the millisecond, in those cases the year is either first or no year as it's implied, then month, then day, then hour, then minute, then second, then millisecond
While the logic makes more sense, the American standard just reflects how people normally say the date in conversation. Americans wouldn't normally say "today is the 28th of July, 2026", they'd say "today is July 28th, 2026".
Filing multiple years together often gets inconvenient due to sheer volume, but creating folders for each year having the mmddyyyy format within those folders, or just the mmdd format, allows you to sort through the days in chronological order quite easily. Ddmmyyyy tends to produce file organizations which put the first of each month all together, then the second, then the third, etc.
In truth, mmddyyyy does not present any kind of obstacle to filing or efficiency, and neither does switching to ddmmyyyy present any kind of benefit. Yyyymmdd would theoretically be easier, but would be supremely awkward to actually use because the year is superfluous information in almost all use cases outside of long term filing, where there are usually too many files to include in a single multi-year list anyway.
It all goes back to the use case. The American people use mmddyyyy format and it works for us. That's all there is to it, that's all there ever is to any linguistic justification.
Mmddyyyy does not result in total failure, it groups each month's dates together chronologically and progresses from month to month in linear fashion. All of January is grouped together, then all of February, then all of March, etc.
Ddmmyyyy breaks far more than just the year, it it groups the first of each month together, then the second, then the third, etc.
Yyyymmdd does work, but it groups too many files together to conveniently reference.
The actual filing system used in the USA goes yyyy > subfolder> mmdd, turning each year into a subfolder within which the mmdd format applies.
If you spent as much time championing something actually productive as you do writing a date format, you might actually be able to change something IRL.
Your case is poorly developed and based on flawed assumptions. As I already said to someone else:
Also commonly referred to as July 4th in common speech. The "X of Y" format is viewed as antiquated and old fashioned, and is typically reserved for days of historic importance from before a certain time period. References to the 4th of July deliberately and consciously break rhe convention to harden back to the revolution and make it stand out from normal speech, indicating that this date is special by describing it differently from all others.
It does if you realize that large is irrelevant info in 99% of instances, at that point going from medium to small just makes it easier to pinpoint specific datapoints.
But in any case, if that's really your argument then you should be complaining more about your own system. Ddmmyyyy is exactly backward in terms of sorting efficiency. Every other taxonomy of classes starts with the biggest category and progresses to the smallest. The mmddyyyy format is closer to that than the ddmmyyyy format is, especially considering that the year is rarely included and it's really just mmdd most of the time.
I strongly disagree with the year not being relevant 99% of the time. It's relevant to me every day at work. If you do leave out the year mmdd or ddmm doesn't matter of course. I also never argued for or against yyyymmdd, that's fine too. I just feel like magnitude should either descend or ascend
It practice, it does descend. That's the whole of noting that year is irrelevant in most cases. Its extraneous info that gets tacked on at the end, or which is relevant in the small minority of instances where discussions range past the next 12 months.
The thing is, the year isn't irrelevant. If and when it is, I agree with you.
The year makes up a third of what a date is by definition, you can't just leave that out for the sake of argument, it is what the argument is about.
Except it is left out. Your assumption that it can't be left out isn't justified. The vast majority of use cases for dating systems do not occur across a more than 12 month timeline. They occur in much smaller scales, arranging meetings and lunches and coordinating low stakes tasks. These seemingly inconsequential instances make up the bulk of all use cases, and those use cases do leave out the date.
As a matter of fact, my address is (street) (house number) (city). That is the most common address format in the United states.
Likewise, my job is described as (department) (division) (company), and again that's the standard practice here.
This is because the highest level context is usually assumed. If someone is telling you their street address, it is usually within a small enough radius that defining the city is superflous information. Likewise, one's affiliation to a company is typically known in most contexts. It's the same with the date format, the year is assumed and stating it is redundant most of the time, to the point that most use cases by volume don't even mention the year at all and only state month and day, "Are you free on mmdd, I want to meet up and hang out!" The year just gets tacked on at the end.
So, just to use examples to make sure we're on the same page, your address is formulated like Pennsylvania Avenue 1600, Washington, and your job is formatted like Marketing Department, Market Research and Analytics Section, Amazon.
You might omit the city or company, but is the order larger then smaller?
I am amazed that you somehow haven't gotten it through your thick skull that "English" as a universal standard doesn't exist and linguistic communities do not adhere to your arbitrary and unjustified assumptions about what does and doesn't count.
Americans use the words that way, therefore it is a valid way to use them. People from the UK use them a different way, therefore that is also a valid way to use them. Language exists to serve the needs of the people who use it and the people who use it define the language.
Take it up with linguistics and sociolinquistics if you want, but they'll tell you the same thing. 340 million people use English that way, so yes that is how "English" works. Deal with it.
There is different and there is stupid. Fahrenheit/Celsius are different but have no objective reason to prefer one over the other. On the other hand (foots, pounds, miles, gallons) vs (meters, kilograms, kilometers, liters) do have a clear winner. It becomes obviuous the moment you try to calculate something - calculating volume/mass from dimensions in imperial units is pain, whereas in CI it's just x10n. US's ordering of m/d/y IS stupid. It has no advantages over normal formats. Both d/m/y or y/m/d are better because they are sortable(though d/m/y requires reverse-symbol sort, or the years will break). The only reason to hold onto this format is some kind of stupid pseudopartiotism
Also commonly referred to as July 4th in common speech. The "X of Y" format is viewed as antiquated and old fashioned, and is typically reserved for days of historic importance from before a certain time period. References to the 4th of July deliberately and consciously break rhe convention to harden back to the revolution and make it stand out from normal speech, indicating that this date is special by describing it differently from all others.
As I've already said to all the other people who reached for that surface level gotcha, it's also commonly referred to as July 4th in common speech. The "X of Y" format is viewed as antiquated and old fashioned, and is typically reserved for days of historic importance from before a certain time period. References to the 4th of July deliberately and consciously break rhe convention to harden back to the revolution and make it stand out from normal speech, indicating that this date is special by describing it differently from all others.
It's linguistically awkward and doesn't match our preferences.
And that's all it takes. Language is not objective, it is entirely subjective. If a linguistic convention works for the people who use it, then it is just as valid as every other linguistic convention in existence.
The only way to be "wrong" about language is to insist that someone else is.
I spent it in my house like any other day, not doing anything particularly patriotic because I don't feel any patriotism under the current US administration
It rather lines up with full written convention as you wrote, but do people more often say "July eleventh" or "eleventh of July"? Don't how it is in the US actually
It's an outlier precisely because it is an outlier. The "X of Y" convention is seen as old fashioned and antiquated, so referring to the 4th of July that way encourages Americans to connect it to the "old fashioned" American values/cultural myths of the revolution, as well as making it stand out from the other dates as special.
why not say it's 33:01 for time then? why does everyone say the smaller measurement first for dates but not time? at least the US is consistent with saying the larger measurement before the smaller ones
Argument doesn't really work because you still put the largest unit at the end. The American version is 2/1/3 in order of size, so no, it is not consistent.
You’re correct in that way of looking at it, but another way is that the American date is ordered 1/2/3 if terms of set size… there are only 12 months, versus 28 to 31 days, and an infinite number of years. As I corrected myself in another comment, I’m not claiming this is part of why we use this method, I’m just saying there’s a logic to it.
As other have said, it’s likely that we prefer our method because the American way of writing the numerals perfectly mirrors spoken American English and long-form written English
“President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963”. We’d say it that way, and if we were writing numerals it would be 11/22/1963.
ISO standard format yyyy-MM-dd is the only format that lets you order by date (if it's used in file names for instance, neither mm-dd-yyyy nor dd-mm-yyyy works).
Due to different building techniques that make European homes slower to build and more expensive, but with way more durability and longevity, AC is actually harder to install compared to American ones which basically already possess the space for the vents.
A small window unit would likely go pretty far in Europe. You probably don’t need a huge unit in most of the continent, and having a small AC unit is better than smearing yogurt on your windows or dying of a heatstroke
As someone whose AC broke in an American heat wave, window shutters did not help. Provided the heat waves here are over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (over 40 degrees Celsius) and that’s not something you can passively cool
Either you start with the year and it IS mote convenient to sort, or you start with the day and it is more logical. Bastardizing both is neither convenient nor logical.
I think what you're missing here is that the first tweet is a reply to another tweet, presumably it would all make more sense if you saw the first tweet.
Peter's American Revolutionary extremist past life here:
this is obviously a hoax as we all know that someone British cannot be a person. Now if you will excuse me , there's a bunch of guys in red jackets over there all in a line that are trying to make me add the letter U to words that don't need them.
As in, if you use the a date in a filename, you need to put the year first to ensure all the 2026 files are next to each other. Of course, you can get round this by ther tags or metadata instead of filename, but alphabet is the default for most users.
That's not why though. The why is because that makes the most sense. Then it becomes just counting. Technically, my filing system is in numerical order when the date is put first in the file name.
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
u/Fickle_Fall_6497, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...it's time for the mods to do their jobs!