Odd thoughts

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IanKennedy
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Odd thoughts

Post by IanKennedy »

I've just had an odd thought. In America you say your dates with the month first, so April 4th, December 25th etc. We do it the other way around 4th of April, 25th of December etc.

The odd thought is why is the film called "Born on the Fourth of July"?
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T'Pau
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Re: Odd thoughts

Post by T'Pau »

My guess is that example follows a Springsteen song title, as well as the 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' song with the same lyric.
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Nutso
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Re: Odd thoughts

Post by Nutso »

It's the title of the Ron Kovic's autobiography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_on_t ... th_of_July
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Re: Odd thoughts

Post by RK_Striker_JK_5 »

I'm now wondering why the UK and the USA do it differently...
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Re: Odd thoughts

Post by IanKennedy »

Who knows. We do it in a logical order, smallest largest. day, month, year. 13th February 1965. America goes February 13, 1965, which is middle, small then large. China and other parts of Asia also do it logically, but totally different from the UK. They go year, month, day. Which has an advantage of being alphabetically sortable.
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Re: Odd thoughts

Post by IanKennedy »

The odd thing is this is an American wrote the autobiography, the song and the movie. An American directed the movie and yet they are using he British system.
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Re: Odd thoughts

Post by Nutso »

I wonder if the way we verbalize dates in the U.S. was inspired by some kind of pop culture phenomenon like a war movie where the hero is writing correspondence to his love at home and says the date as "June 25th, 1942?" The way how Sir Patrick Stewart is alleged to have secured the pronunciation of 'data' from dah-tah to day-ta?
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Re: Odd thoughts

Post by McAvoy »

US military uses the smallest to large format too. So 04APR23 in logbook entries.

Not sure why we do the month first.
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