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Why do Americans want to know the month first and the day second? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by NONE_dc@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I'm sorry but it doesn't make sense TO ME. Based on what I was taught, regardless of the month, I think what matters first is to know what day of the month you are in, if at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of said month. After you know that, you can find out the month to know where you are in the year.

What is the benefit of doing it the other way around?

EDIT: To avoid misunderstandings:

I am NOT making fun OF ANYONE.
I am NOT negatively judging ANYTHING.
I am totally open to being corrected and LEARN.
This post is out of pure and honest CURIOSITY.

So PLEASE, don't take it the wrong way.

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[–] DirigibleProtein@aussie.zone 12 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Why do Americans use MM/DD/YY for date, but not mm:ss:hh for time? Doesn’t that make the same amount of sense?

[–] NONE_dc@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

I don't know! that's why I'm asking!

[–] Duckingold@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

Your looking at it from a digital era. When things were paper based, month-day-year made a bunch of sense.

Our work paper archives are stored in "year" boxes (used to be filing cabinets). Open those, and you have folders that have month-day-year on their tab label. This makes it so you can quickly go through the folders sequentially quickly. If you did YYYYMMDD, you would need to ignore the first 4 numbers. DDMMYYY, the labels won't be in numerical order.

Putting files back, you look for the correct year, but then it's easy to drop the folder back into it's numerical position.

In a digital structure, filing records is automated and we can use a search function, so we do store digital files as YYYYMMDD.