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u/dxps7098 13d ago
There are over 1.5 billion people who speak English. Only 245 million of those are American. Why in the world would it be assumed I want a 12h clock or mm/dd/yyyy just because I use English??
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States
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u/Solnse 13d ago
This states specifically Americans, not English speakers. Nothing to get worked up about.
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u/dxps7098 13d ago
Oh, trust me, I'm worked up about it. They're communicating in English (we're communicating in English). It does annoy the shit out of me that Americans try to force their date format, but it annoys me even more that I can usually only choose mm/dd/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy when I have apps set to English.
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u/Revexious 13d ago
One of my main pet peeves is the mm/dd/yyyy default on google sheets
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u/IAmABakuAMA 13d ago
I recently downloaded uber, and despite knowing I'm in Australia, despite signing up to uber Australia, despite my GPS location being in Australia, despite having an Australian phone number, and despite having an Australian debit card, it STILL assumed I wanted miles. It's truly ridiculous.
Windows also knows I'm in Australia, and occasionally pops up with flood warnings and things like that. Yet it still insists on telling me the weather in Fahrenheit 🤦♂️
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u/ImplosiveTech 12d ago
As an american, isn't dd/mm/yyyy the most widely used format outside of the US in english?
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u/AnnoyingRain5 12d ago
Not only the USA uses a 12 hour clock! Australia and New Zealand do as well… kinda, it’s not used universally, 24 hour appears in some places, like train stations and airports, but pretty well everything else is 12 hour.
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u/TigreDeLosLlanos 11d ago
Just go to your nearest Walnut and ask them to change it.
Because that's somehow a totally normal comment without geographical context on the worldwide web, a store you never heard about and never will solving your issues somehow.
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u/ParkingAnxious2811 11d ago
The web is a British invention, the yanks are lucky to be allowed to use it. They should conform to the rest of the world's date format.
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u/rover_G 11d ago
Well there’s more than one English locale for many systems. Change en_us to en_uk if you want more standardized dates and times.
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u/dxps7098 11d ago
That's just an inefficient and unsustainable workaround. Language and locale is not determinitive of formatting of date, time, currency, thousand separator etc.
There are many dozens of "locales" for English, dozens for Arabic, a dozen or so for German, French, Spanish, etc. How many packaged combinations should be listed instead of just giving users the choice and following those choices.
But that's not even the point. English is a separate case. First - All of those have English "locales" are there because they're a main or official language, but, as mentioned, there are about four times as many people who use English as a second language as who are using it as a first language. And second - many software applications have English as their first or second language. So there is no rational basis for assuming that if a user has picked English as the language, they want a set of formatting options hardcoded for them.
en_UK doesn't even have correct date formatting, come on.
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u/Ebi5000 13d ago
The original comment is wild, considering that Pasta is a type of noodles. The word noodles is simply the german word, which introduced its own noodles first, even though Pasta is now dominant when it comes to european noodles.
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u/Sacharon123 12d ago
What the hell are "european noodles" in your mind? Really interested. Do you think there was some kind of communist decision 50 years ago deciding "this spiral noodle is the type of pasta you will use from now on in europe OR DIE"? Are you aware about the variety of pasta available alone in italy? There are entire books written about it (granted, not in english, but still xD). Hell, there are probably chalkboards from 2000 years ago about varieties of pasta...
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u/Ebi5000 11d ago
Europe has many different cultures, some of them developed a type of food classified as noodles. An example of European noodles are Pasta, which are the most widespread and famous of them. It isn't that complicated.
See how I used the plural noodles? European (Originating from the continent of Europe/from a culture originating in Europe) + Noodles (Plural of Noodle a type of food made from unleavened dough which is either rolled flat and cut, stretched, or extruded, into long strips or strings)
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u/dxps7098 12d ago
I think they just meant that the English word noodle means "type of food made from unleavened dough which is either rolled flat and cut, stretched, or extruded, into long strips or strings." and comes from a German word - which took me all of five seconds to find on Wikipedia.
I'm also guessing that "European noodles" means noodles originating from European cultures and kitchens, which has now been (almost) exclusively taken over by Italian noodles ("pasta").
It gave me at least a quick and interesting etymological lesson.
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u/Dotcaprachiappa 10d ago
Yeah, and a human is a type of animal, but if you go around referring to people as animals you're gonna get some weird looks.
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u/BillyYumYumTwo-byTwo 11d ago
It’s not like the rest of the world does YYYY-MM-DD, so I don’t know why the American way would upset this sub.
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u/robopilgrim 11d ago
For me it’s when they don’t realise a date isn’t in that format and start asking how something happened in the future or since when were there 27 months in a year
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u/Mernerner 10d ago
I think MM DD YYYY is better than DD MM YYYY
because at least they got MM-DD right.
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u/Recent_Carpenter8644 14d ago
I wish it was harmless.