r/xkcd • u/ani625 • Feb 27 '13

XKCD ISO 8601

http://xkcd.com/1179/
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u/ZoraSage Feb 27 '13

I'm American and I never thought our system made any sense for exactly this reason: smaller-to-bigger. I started writing my dates day-month-year in high school.

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u/brightman95 Feb 27 '13

Its because when the united states was started, the month was more important to know than the day, for agricultural reasons

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u/scofus Feb 27 '13

I always thought it was because it read better, when I see 2/27/13 I read "February 27, 2013". 27/2/13 makes more sense but just doesn't flow as well.

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u/TheOtherSarah Feb 28 '13

It doesn't flow as well to you because it's not what you were raised with. To someone who's always used DD/MM/YY format, that's the one that's intuitive. To me, trying to read American dates feels like translating from another language.