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…

• That test was as hard as hell
• He’s as dumb as hell
• This coffee is as cold as hell.

Ummmmm.  Is hell dumb, hard, cold?  You’re giving hell a bad name   AND, you’re using simile poorly!

At least take a second and think of what hell is like (or what you think it is like, or if you don’t believe in hell, what you imagine OTHERS mean when they think of Hell).  Below, I am beginning a list of word that Hell CAN be compared to (blank is _____ as Hell).  Would love your thoughts…

• Scary
• Hot
• Long
• Frightening
• Torturous
• Lonely