STANDARD DATE FORMAT and US difficulties

Elzbieta Porteneuve — Sun Apr 24, 2016 4:59 am

Author: Elzbieta Porteneuve

Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2016 4:59 am

We are in the 21st century, but this issue arises all the time.

STANDARD DATE FORMAT
First and foremost: the universal date system is ISO 8601, yyyy-mm-dd, even in the USA, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Despite that universal date standard (used inside each and every electronic component, computer, satellite, elevator, frige, mobile phone, etc.), the visual conventions remains, dividing the world into the world and US exception (which I will even not mention here, too weird to be said).

The world uses dd-mm-yyyy convention in visual (dash, slash, dot are separators), that means printed on paper or on the screen.
In the middle of any century one may use dd-mm-yy.

One Polish specific rule is that you may write month in Roman numbers, we learnt it in school. It seems it is no longer teached this way in 21st century.

In summary, when Polish date is written in numbers, the month is always in the second place, never in the first.
The year number is offten followed by letter r with dot, like 23.VI.45r. - that "r." stands for "rok"=year, and dot is abbreviation mark.

Example of 23 June 1945, Polish handwritten dates:
23 czerwca 1945
23.VI.1945
23.VI.45 [ambiguity if you deal with records from 1800s and 1900s]
23.06.1945
1945-06-23

The US brain's washing regarding date format, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_the_United_States

It seems the ISO 8601 system, used in the US, is called in the US "military system".

The only place where you can easily find the US date format standard is here
https://iaspub.epa.gov/sor_internet/registry/datastds/findadatastandard/epaapproved/representationofdateandtime/RepDateTime_10212014.pdf

That is even more weird that I thought.

==
Best,
Elisabeth

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STANDARD DATE FORMAT and US difficulties