Date Order

29-08-23 00 / episode: 225

Script

"Date order.

Have you ever given it much thought? A lot of people don't, you have the standard date order and you write your dates in that order except what is the standard date order? Americans have a funny way of putting the day in between the year and the month.

I'm not sure about all the different countries and what their standard orders are.

But you could put the year first and the day and then the month and that's how I see a lot of American people do it and then you could put the year first and the month and the day personally.

That's my preference.

I like it because it's logical.

We go from larger to smaller and then you could do the day, month, year, which is the exact opposite.

There's all sorts of combinations.

And if you go into Japan, they have another standard set, they usually do month, day year, but I have seen day, month, year.

Um, pardon me? The, the, what did I say? The standard is year, month date in Japan? I think, yes, you see when I'm just talking, it gets all mixed up.

It's much easier to write this down date order can be confusing and it's quite confusing if you only have numbers and you don't know what the standard is.

There's the problem if you put in just a set of numbers and you separate them with commas or dashes or hyphens, then the person reading it might not understand what the date means because they might think of a different standard.

So you have to be careful, standardization is important if we want to have communication.

This is one of those funny things.

We start off with date order and we end up moving to standards, language works because everybody uses the same standards.

We know that this word means this and that word means that yet when we go from country to country, everybody wants to have their own standard.

And there's the problem, we've got to agree on standards and then we have fewer problems with communication.

And this can be really important in terms of business and science and you know, collective activities like going to the moon.

So we should probably make a standard international Date order.

What do you think?"