The Case For MM-DD-YYYY

I used to sort of take it for granted that the US convention for listing dates, which starts with the month, then gives the day, then the year, was a weird anachronism that we would never choose to do today. I mean wouldn’t it make more sense to go from specific to broad, or broad to specific? For time, for example, we start with the hour, then get more specific to the minute, then more specific to the second, if listed. For days, it would probably make more sense to go in the other direction and start with the day.

Which, as it happens, is what most countries do.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that it’s not actually so simple, and you can thank Ordinary Times and the Clare Briggs cartoons for that. For multiple reasons, going by month first has proven to be quite helpful.

There are two arguments in favor of the international DD-MM-YYYY format, one intuitive but bad and the other thoughtful and good. The bad reason is actually the one I listed above: It’s makes for a more consistent motion going from specific to broad. Putting the most specific item in the middle makes no sense. Conceptually this is true, but the purpose of showing dates is not conceptual. The purpose of listing a date is to be able to quickly access the information at a glance. Conceptually, it might make sense for both days and time to go from broad-to-specific (therefore start putting the year first on dates) or specific-to-broad (therefore putting seconds before minutes), but that’s not what we’re looking for when we’re looking at the time. It makes sense to display the time as it is used, and that usually (though not always, as we will see below) makes showing the year first or seconds/minutes before hours wrong.

The stronger argument leans into that. We list the hour first when we show time because that is the item we are most likely to be interested in. It changed every hour and most of the time when we schedule something, the hour is the most important part because it tells us which part of the day. Then the next is minute, which helps us get more specific. Then is seconds, which we usually don’t even need. You want to put the part you don’t usually need last. So with this thinking, wouldn’t you want the day first when showing the dates? Daily tear-off calendars put the day number very largely because they know, at a glance, what people are looking for.

The problem is that while this is true much of the time, sometimes it is the opposite of true. On a day to day basis, we’re interested in looking at the… errr… day. But sometimes we’re specifically looking at the broader view where the thing we are most interested in the year. Most of the time when I want to know a date from anything more than a couple years in the past or future, I am actually most interested in the year. Obviously, it’s easy enough to look at the end of a listed date to get that information so there’s no problem.

If you’re human. And here’s where Clare Briggs comes into play.

Many of the Clare Briggs cartoon file names have two dates listed on them. At the beginning of the filename is the date that I have tagged the cartoon to run (YYYY-MM-DD). At the end, in parenthesis, is the date that it originally ran (MM.DD.YY). I list the Ordinary Times publication date by year first, then month, then day. That is so Windows and the web server will be able to easily organize them in chronological order. It makes sense in any alphanumeric system to list the year first. So maybe we should always do that? No, because it’s a common but not the typical use case.

But since it is common, it puts us in a bit of a pickle. Sometimes we want the year last and out of the way because much of the time we don’t even need the year listed, and much of the time it is optimal to have the day of the month first because it is the most pertinent information that as us looking at the calendar. Sometimes – typically when dealing with computers – we really need the year first, though, and really need the month second, and the day third.

So how do we handle this? Do we try to figure out from context? We usually can. But common month numbers and common day number overlaps. We could read a listed date of 2024/1/2 as being January 2, 2024, while knowing that 1/2/2024 is actually the first of February (if not in the US). That’s easy enough. But what about 1/2 without the year? Or what about when the year is listed as two numbers and falls between 1-30? That seems simple, and it is, but slip-ups are surprisingly easy if you’re having to switch gears from one to the other. This I can also tell you from the Clare Briggs cartoons, where I am frequently thrown off by the second date on the file name having a different format than the first¹, despite the fact there are context clues (parenthesis and periods instead of dashes²).

Meanwhile, MM-DD-YYYY is the perfect splitting of the difference. That makes it so that 01-02 is always January second. You don’t have to worry about putting the year first when it doesn’t belong, you don’t have to worry about decoding it. It’s very consistent, and that to my mind is worth more than the inconvenience of having to look at the middle number when the full date is listed. Then you can put the year first, if dealing with an alphanumeric system, or last, if dealing with context where the year isn’t that important (or can be assumed). It doesn’t cover the main use case (looking at the date at a glance) all that well, but it covers both regular and alphanumeric use cases well enough. It’s a quite useful compromise between system.

The advantage here is actually slight, and honestly for Europe not worth the pain of the transition. Ultimately, the best date display is the one everyone is used to. And the biggest problem is neither that Americans use MM-DD-YYYY nor that Europe uses DD-MM-YYYY but that we are used to different ones.

After dealing with the Clare Briggs cartoons and other alphanumeric systems, however, I’ve become quite glad that we Americans are on the side of the divide that we are on. The sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and 01-02 can safely be assumed to be January 2 regardless of where and whether the year appears.

1. Because both do go MM-DD, it’s the year that throws me off. I could easily have avoided this when originally naming the files by making the year four digits instead of two. But I didn’t, and because I’m still getting numbers jumbled in my mind it’s still instructive
2. If you had asked me before I did all of this, I would have suggested that the easiest way to handle MM-DD in some contexts and DD-MM in others is to use different symbols. Use the period if going from MM.DD and the dash if going from DD-MM or something. The Clare Briggs experience has taught me that helps a lot less than I would have guessed. I think the mind just glides over the punctuation.