A Proposal to Remove Calendar Date Ambiguity
As we know, the way dates and times are written varies around the world, and not just by language. To refer to the second day of this year as “January 2, 2013″ is unambiguous. But to refer to it as “1/2/13″ invites confusion. In most of the world, this notation actually refers to February 1st. Only in the United States and Belize is “1/2/13″ consistently used to refer to January. And it’s not just a battle of day-first versus month-first — in most of Asia and some of Europe, people put the year first, referring to January 2nd as “13/2/1″.
While it shouldn’t be the highest priority by any means, it certainly would be easier if we all used one standard of date notation. It seems to make sense to go from day to year because (1) the majority of people in the world already do and (2) it stacks in a logical order from small to large. However, being in America, personally switching from month/day/year to day/month/year would accomplish nothing, and actually just add confusion. What should I do?
Therefore, I instead offer that we spell out the month — talking about January 2nd as “2/Jan/2013″. This preserves the day-month-year order but is completely clear and straightforward even to those who are used to the month/day/year system. Every English-speaker in the world should be able to see “2/Jan/2013″ and understand what date it refers to. The goal of this substitution is that we coordinate successfully, but also communicate clearly even to those who are unaware of the coordination.
As for time-of-day, it’s also unclear what “1:00″ refers to — is this on a 12-hour clock, referring to either an hour after midnight or an hour after noon, or on a 24-hour clock, referring to an hour after midnight?
The 12 hour clock has strong usage in the United States, but the 24-hour clock is in the majority. However, I think only the 12-hour clock can accomplish the goal of acheiving coordination while communicating clearly to those unaware of the coordination. It’s very clear that “13:00″ must be the 24-hour clock, “1:00″ will remain forever ambiguous unless some sort of clarification is offered.
If we instead talk in 12 hour time and always notate it with “am” or “pm”, this clearly means the 12 hour clock is being used to every English-speaker. I suppose one could also use a 24-hour clock that also made reference to “am” or “pm”, for example, referring to an hour after midnight as 1am and an hour after noon as 13hrs.
Anyways, the date-time format “2/Jan/2013 1am” is the one I will use personally and throughout this blog. When referring to day-of-week, I will either spell them out or use their three-letter abbreviations. (One letter abbreviations lead to confusion over “T” as Tuesday or Thursday and “S” as Saturday or Sunday; multiple solutions exist, but none are clear to those not in the know.)
(Also, I think the week should start on Monday, but I don’t think there’s any way we could universalize that in a way that is still clear to those not in the know.)
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On 23 Jan 2013 in All, Words. 7 Comments.
23 Jan 2013, 9:20 am
My own practice with dates is to always put the year first and to zero-pad months and days so that they are always two digits:
2013-02-01
This has two advantages as I see it: First, it is universally unambiguous. Whenever someone from any part of the world sees the year first, they understand (or should understand) that the month comes second. Second, a list of dates so formatted will always be sortable by a computer if needed. E.g. if this were incorporated into a file naming convention, then the operating system would display the files in a sensible order. (Yes, a lot of applications are smart enough to detect a date and sort accordingly, but I still find this useful in many contexts.)
Side note: I got in the habit using a full four digits for my years back in 1999, in the lead-up to Y2K. I think a lot of people took the wrong lesson from that. Everybody jokes about how the threat fizzled and all that money was wasted trying to retrofit applications, but an argument can be made that the reason it fizzled is precisely because we did take the threat seriously and invested the resources in advance to mitigate it. I worry what this kind of attitude says about our ability as a species to spot and to react to future threats.
23 Jan 2013, 1:30 pm
Just use our (Polish) ISO standard YYYY-MM-DD and your problems are over!
23 Jan 2013, 6:33 pm
Given the extreme rarity of “year – day – month” formats, I’d agree with you, though I suppose such a format is possible. But that kind of confusion is nitpicky. The second benefit of being sortable with a computer is also very beneficial, and why I have used the Year – Month – Day format in personal programming.
However, one benefit that the 1/Feb system has over the 2013-02-01 system is just that — the system can remain sensical even if the year is not stated, whereas the Year-Month-Day system must always have the year printed.
25 Jan 2013, 7:25 pm
Why not use spaces instead of virgules? “2 Jan 2013″ looks cleaner than “2/Jan/2013″ IMO. It also is in use in some countries.
26 Jan 2013, 3:50 pm
Now I’m trying that out. Let me know what you think.
28 Jan 2013, 10:16 am
1am is OK but 13pm is a nonsense and reveals the ignorance of the writer. ‘pm’ means ‘post meridian’ = after noon.
Why is it that so many Americans know so little and pretend to the rest of the world that they know so much? There are exceptions like Truman, JFK,Bill Clinton but they seem all to be in the past.
Look at America’s overseas projects under other administrations. Viet Nam = disaster. Mid-East policy = failure after failure, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan = failure. Are things much better off at home? Not if you look at the size of the national debt, the level of unemployment, the collapse of Banks.
“God bless America’ certainly. ‘God help America’ looks more and more necessary.
28 Jan 2013, 3:14 pm
Fixed.
The rest of your comment is irrelevant and overstated.