man, that title could have about 10 different meanings 
When you write the date, how do you write it?
Seems like most (all?) Americans write month/day/year. Good job USA in getting us all to do it the same way.
My experience was always that other (European?) countries wrote day/month/year. Makes sense as it is from smallest/most immediate to biggest unit. So, that’s how I learned to write the date in French class in high school and I’ve been writing the date since we moved to SA.
Here, I have found that people write the date all sorts of ways. Seems like on hospital forms, they generally use year/month/day. I’ve filled out bank forms one way, misc. official paperwork another way, and never know HOW an individual may write the date on something they give me. I asked my son how they do it at school (where you’d think they’d be teaching the standard) and he told me that the do it one way (I’ve actually forgot which now) in all of his classes except math. In math class, they write the date a different way. What? Maybe this has something to do with the changeover since Apartheid or some reality of Bantu education? I don’t know, but I find it strange that everyone in the country doesn’t use the same way of writing the date.
Beyond making some clever societal observation, I am really interested in why this is done the way it is in different places. There must be some meaning behind this…
I like the month/day/year the least, for the reason you mentioned (being in neither ascending nor descending scale-order).
I prefer year/month/day, although it seems to be rarely used.
Assuming you always stick with two digits for the month & day (prefixing with zeros for single digits), you can then sort a list of dates “alphabetically” and have it also be in chronological order:
20081230
20090512
20090602
etc.
This works for at least for the next 8,000 years, at which point we’ll have to worry about Y10K.
I have asked about that here in SA and was told that whether you write year/month/day or day/month/year, the month is always in the middle so as NOT to be confusing (whether this is successful or not is up to you).
After five years of German study, I was taught to write it day (the number), month (written out) and year (the number) so it looked like this: 13May2009. Just thought I’d add one more to the mix!
We used to write it Day Month Year in full or in figures
13 May 2009 or 13/5/2009 or 13/5/09
but in 1971 we went metric, and adopted SI units.
So the Metrication Board told us how to write the date.
2009 05 13
and the time
20h54
But then they decided to change it, and said that we must write the date with dashes:
2009-05-13
and the time with colons:
20:54
So strictly speaking all figure dates should be yyyy-mm-dd
and if you are writing it in full you can write 13 May 2009
But of course if you went to school when one of the other conventions was used, you might carry on using that.
When I enter stuff in computer databases, I like 2009-05-13, because it is simple to sort in a text field. And if you don’t know the exact day, you can just write 2009-05-00 and it will still sort more or less correctly.
Just try that with American dates!
But newspapers still follow the old-fashioned (VERY old fashioned) May 13, 2009.
Have we sorted out the dates yet?
Next problem – what’s a billion?
The metrication board told us 10^12, and that 10^9 is a milliard.
But do the newspapers follow that? Nope, they don’t.
Anyone says “billion” to me and I just say it means “a lot”, though nowadays Americans seem to write that “alot”.