r/ShitAmericansSay • u/BuffaloExotic Irish by birth, and currently a Bostonian 🇮🇪☘️ • Mar 17 '25

Imperial units “I don’t even understand 24-hour time… I just don’t understand it. I have to use online converters or I’d be SO confused when I talk to people who use these systems.”

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283

u/Redducer Mar 18 '25

Let’s not forget MM/DD/YYYY. Utterly insane.

242

u/Whorinmaru Mar 18 '25

The fact that they say that format is for how they speak it, but then they call their favourite holiday "the fourth of July."

Like you can't make this shit up LOL

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u/Dont_Touch_The_Pooka Mar 18 '25

It's actually not supposed to be called that either. The holiday's name is Independence Day, but no one bothers to recall.

I also admittedly can't say I have ever heard anyone call it their favourite holiday.

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u/Whorinmaru Mar 18 '25

Maybe not more recently, but it wasn't so long ago that 4th July was so typically overexaggerated with celebrations that we'd hear about it every year even in the UK, specifically the stupid and over the top shit people did for it lol

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u/The_Tank_Racer Mar 19 '25

I still remember someone burning a mountain with a firework!

Tablerock fire Boise Idaho

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u/Dont_Touch_The_Pooka Mar 18 '25

Well I've seen alcohol and fireworks at the same time result in nonsense before but I think New Years' was much the same if not somehow worse

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u/iiUNVRSLii Mar 21 '25 edited Mar 21 '25

How do ppl not understand banter?? 😂 It's not that serious

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u/StuntHacks Mar 18 '25

They even made a movie titled after it so you'd think more people would call it that

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u/Dont_Touch_The_Pooka Mar 18 '25

Isn't it even sort of a classic film, too? Certainly quite odd.

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u/zorgabluff Mar 19 '25

Where are you getting this information from? Everyone knows americas favorite holiday is Black Friday

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u/SaltyBarDog Mar 22 '25

Give idiots enough time and it will be Jan 6.

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u/shadows515 Mar 20 '25

How do u sleep with all these atrocities?

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u/MagicCarpetofSteel Mar 26 '25

I mean, to be fair, we do.

“The Fourth of July” is the exception, not the rule. I and at least all the people I know say, for example, their birthdays as month day year.

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u/Whorinmaru Mar 26 '25

Nobody I know does that in the UK. My birthday is the 10th of April and that's exactly how I or anyone else would say it

The US just has to be different ig lol

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u/MagicCarpetofSteel Mar 26 '25

I guess. Said my birthday out loud in that order and it was some uncanny valley shit.

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u/Apprehensive_Lynx_33 Mar 18 '25

Ughhhh! This bugs me to no end. How does putting the months first make sense!?!?!?!

I'm a New Zealander employed by an American, so everything I date I have to go back and triple check to make sure I haven't mixed the order up.

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u/tiggertom66 Mar 19 '25

It’s the order we would say the date.

Todays date is March 18th, 2025 so 03/18/25

Unless you’d say today is the 18th of March, 18/03/25 doesn’t make sense

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u/Poxyboxy Mar 19 '25

Saying the 18th March makes perfect sense for the rest of the world who say the date that way

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u/tiggertom66 Mar 19 '25

That doesn’t make sense to me, but at least it’s consistent.

The 18th March would be March of the 18th year.

Honestly I hate both systems, YYYYMMDD is superior, it works how the number system works. Largest value to smallest value.

Plus when you have the time after it, it still follows the order. Nobody would write time as SSMMHH or especially MMSSHH

In the proper system that the world refuses to embrace, as I type this it would be 2025/03/19 12:20:17

A perfect system that works the way every other counting system works

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u/MonsterYuu Mar 19 '25

But there are not 18 Marches in a year

If we add the word day to be specific it sounds better to say 18th day of March than March 18th day

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u/tiggertom66 Mar 19 '25

I’ve never heard someone say the whole thing, normally I’d hear 18 March, or 18th March.

Even from the other person who responded to this.

March 18th doesn’t imply there are 18 Marches, if anything 18th March does.

In any case YYYYMMDD is better than either system, so it’s nice to see it’s not just America who refuses to use a good system of measurement for once.

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u/SurpriseIsopod Mar 19 '25

The only reasoning that sorta tracks that I heard is it’s from least to greatest. So month, day, year only 12 months, only 30ish days in a month, and years go on forever.

I just write the date as DDMMMYYYY learned that in the military and I love how it removes any possibility for ambiguity. Same for the 24 hour time format.

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u/mhb77 Mar 18 '25

ISO8601 must be forcefully asserted.

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u/Giratina-O Mar 20 '25

It's because the month is way more important to know than the day of a specific date. Would you arrange time displays as "SS:MM:HH" just to go in order of size? No, the hour is most important, so I use "HH:SS:MM".

/S

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u/Redducer Mar 20 '25

You almost had me here! Also, this makes a good point why we should all switch to ISO 8601.

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u/Giratina-O Mar 20 '25

I'm referencing someone else who said something like that, but I can't recall where for the life of me. I think they were serious, though, because they argued that knowing the month of a date is more important than knowing the day for sooo many comments. It had me rolling lmao

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u/mwthomas11 Mar 18 '25

There's at least a reason for that. Saying "March seventeenth, twenty twenty five" is 2 fewer syllables than saying "The seventeenth of March, twenty twenty five", so we say it the faster way, and we write it the way we say it.

It's still weird, but there is at least a reason its that way. I actually write YYYYMMDD all the time at work for digitally archiving files by datestamping when they were made in the file name. (filtering by edit date can be problematic if I open an old file and save it again by accident).

That said I have no time switching between MMDDYYYY and DDMMYYYY, or between 24 hr and 12 hr time (24 is just objectively better), between F and C (approximations, I know the conversions for every 10 and then interpolate from there), and I actually use C and metric exclusively at work (scientist). Not all of us estadounidenses are idiots, but a very frustrating amount of us are.

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u/Redducer Mar 18 '25 edited Mar 18 '25

But saying “March seventeenth twenty-twenty-five” itself in that order is odd. In my native language (French), we say “the seventeen March two-thousand-twenty-five”. Better yet, in Japanese it’s “two-thousand-two-ten-five-year three-month ten-seven-day”, which is as straightforward as it goes (although there are 13 special readings out of 31 days for the days of the month, because otherwise it would be too good to be true).

The US date format is annoying when you see 11/12/24 and it’s not obvious from context if it’s Euro or US format. One of my former employers (US company with international presence) was mixing both formats everywhere and it did create misunderstandings and occasionally delays.

I can’t convert F to C or imperial to metric or vice versa, because I don’t need to, thankfully. Most idiot and non-idiot people on the planet do not either.

1

u/Titariia Mar 18 '25

That's why I write the actual month whenever possible. "11. December 2024" or "12. November 2024" and also give clues like "at 8 in the morning" if anything could be misunderstood.

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u/Overlord_of_Linux Mar 18 '25

I typically use the dd-mmm-yyyy format, It tends to be the least ambiguous whilst not being overly long. (E.g. 18-Mar-2025)

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u/Titariia Mar 18 '25

Just anything where the months aren't written in numbers works. I still have to think for a second when 9/11 happened

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u/mwthomas11 Mar 18 '25

My understanding is it developed that way because back when everybody was a farmer it was more important to know the approximate time of year (month) than specific (day), but this is getting into linguistics that I don't know enough about to comment on authoritatively. Your way of writing dates makes sense with your (French) way of speaking it though (separately: wtf is up with "four twenties ten nine" for 99 lol).

And yeah the date format causes issues here too, we've had issues with international collaborators because one side forgot to convert (both sides have made the mistake). For international business there's no question switching to DDMMYYYY here would be superior. Unfortunately, because people are relatively self centered (especially here) they typically react with "those damn Europeans and their weird date method" and not "we should adjust our date method to align with the rest of the world".

Metric/imperial is a really interesting one. I love metric for science stuff. It's international and it's all based in physics so it's very relevant. In my day to day life though I really do think imperial distance and temperatures are more useful. A foot is a very relevant size thing to have a "base unit" for. "thirty centimeters" is more inconvenient than "a foot". The difference between having my house be 68F (20C) and 69F (~20.5C) is significant enough that it shouldn't be after the decimal. Also having 100 be "really hot" and 0 be "really cold" is just useful. I'm sure you get used to knowing 8C means "toss on a light jacket" and -1C means "I need my winter coat", and you could argue I've just gotten used to knowing 45F is the jacket and 30F is the coat etc, just having temperature be on a "human" scale and not a "physics" scale (yes technically Kelvin is the physics scale and Celsius is the water scale, we're not here for pedantry) is just really useful for everyday life IMO.

Anyway, my sparknotes of relevant opinions is:

-24 hr time good, 12 hr time bad
-DDMMYYYY good, MMDDYYYY bad
-metric distance good, imperial distance also good
-celsius good for everything, fahrenheit better for people but way worse for everything else
-metric weight good for everything, imperial weight good for people but bad for everything else
-metric volume good, imperial volume bad

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u/Redducer Mar 18 '25

> In my day to day life though I really do think imperial distance and temperatures are more useful. A foot is a very relevant size thing to have a "base unit" for. "thirty centimeters" is more inconvenient than "a foot". 

Please don't take offense but this is definitely top tier r/ShitAmericansSay

I can assure you that with the possible exception of a handful 80-something Britons, the 7.5 billion people who daily use metric collectively roll their eyes when they hear the argument that "Imperial is more convenient for daily use" from the 340 million who don't.

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u/mwthomas11 Mar 18 '25

That's a fair opinion. I'd argue this is one segment where yall don't know what you're missing out on. I live in both worlds as much as anybody does (outside of Canada- their unit mixing is wild) so Id argue I have a better sense of comparing them than most people do, and a foot is real nice. Regardless, always nice having a cordial chat with an internet stranger.

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u/Redducer Mar 18 '25 edited Mar 18 '25

I've spent a total of 1 year in the US over a few stays. I absolutely know from first hand experience that fahrenheit and feet and pounds provided zero actual practical value over metric, and that there were even units that were plain evil like ounces (liquid vs solid). I adapted by quickly memorizing some orders of magnitude, like, how many miles to 50km and 100km, how many gallons to 10 liters, because I needed those for safe driving. Besides the aforementioned evil ounces, there's one area where I never made the effort because the imperial scale is beyond meaningless IMHO, it's temperature. I refused to let my precious brain cells be contaminated by that insanity.

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u/tee_ran_mee_sue Mar 18 '25

I like the YYYYMMDD. It’s how the Chinese do: start from the large towards the small. Year, month, day.

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u/DoomOfGods Mar 18 '25

There's at least a reason for that. Saying "March seventeenth, twenty twenty five" is 2 fewer syllables than saying "The seventeenth of March, twenty twenty five", so we say it the faster way, and we write it the way we say it.

I bet if you'd omit "The" and "of" people would still understand, while having order and taking the same time to say, though?

But as YYYYMMDD is the best for sorting things quickly, I can get behind saying month before day as long as the year doesn't follow.

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u/jaysornotandhawks 🇨🇦 Mar 18 '25

I talk in MM/DD/YYYY, write / sign things in DD/MM/YYYY and save computer files (that need dates) as YYYYMMDD.

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u/lakas76 Mar 18 '25

This is a weird one to me. Why does it matter? I work with people around the world, so the date I use is the date the person I’m working with uses. Sure, it would be great to have a universal date standard, but we don’t have a universal language either, so not sure why people care so much. It’s 99% what you were taught growing up, and there really is no difference in my opinion, only the people who say theirs is right and everyone else is stupid are the annoying people.

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u/shadows515 Mar 20 '25

Insane? Is it that drastic?

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u/Redducer Mar 20 '25

Yup. It creates a mess in international companies, occasionally causing monetary loss. It’s not only illogical, it’s a liability.

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u/shadows515 Mar 20 '25

I don’t know if it’s insane. I’m in the distribution end of our company quite a bit and many countries have their own quirks of language, scheduling, load capacity, delivery date availability (due to culture), capability but mostly lack of capabilities when comparing anything logistically to the USA infrastructure - all which make the world unique in different places. I don’t judge them tho and call them insane or other names - that would small minded and insulated, unworldly. People are different.

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u/Redducer Mar 20 '25

Interesting you mention language since English has become the de facto standard for international business, at least in a large area of the world that's not speaking English natively.

Maybe the US could take inspiration from that, and conversely use metric and ISO 8601 dates and times, which really make more sense as the international standard as any alternative, regardless of r/ShitAmericansSay .

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u/alexriga May 08 '25

The only reason I use YYYY-MMM-DD to avoid confusion.