Shortly after 4 AM this morning you could write the exact time and date as 04:05:06 07/08/09.But only in America—and a few other countries [Date and time notation by country].
In Europe you'll have to wait until August 7th and if your country is unlucky enough to have adopted the international standard notation then you've missed the big day by two years.
In Canada we use all three notations and this leads to a great deal of confusion. The good news is that we get to celebrate the sequential date three times. Tonight there will be a huge celebration in downtown Toronto with parades and fireworks and speeches by famous people.
How many more sequential time/dates will we celebrate in Canada this millennium?
If you're on the east coast in the US you've missed "12:34:56 07/08/09" by an hour or so. Central time people set your alarms.
ReplyDeleteWe use all three notations in our lab... this actually causes problems from time to time! (recognising the handwriting becomes a crucial part of the communication...)
ReplyDeleteAren't we officially DD-MM-YY in Canada? Why do people still use MM-DD-YY? It makes NO sense!
For what it's worth, this is the reason I use DD-MMM-YYYY, where the month is the first three letters of the month, e.g.
ReplyDelete07-JUL-2009
It also has the advantage of alternating numbers and characters. Among other things, it makes for lazy parsing if you're a programmer! (You can choose to drop the dashes and it's still clear, e.g. 07JUL2009 and parse it easily.)
Of course, this really is an English language-only solution...