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Jon G Auerbach
From its red, white and blue emblem to its "Classic American Lager" motto, Budweiser is unmistakably a US brew. But every Bud label now includes a feature about as American as a bathroom with a bidet -- a production date that reads this way: 01 Jun99.
In a case of encroaching calendrical correction, the quirky US style of date-writing is giving way to the day-first standard used by most of the world. Americans have led with the month for 200 years, but now many US daters -- from consistency-obsessed computer programmers tointernationally mined citizens -- are switching, convinced their way is clearer or more sophisticated.
"It shows you know something different than the guy flipping hamburgers down the street," says James W. Baker, a convert to Euro-dating and a historian at the Plimoth Plantation museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Sayre A Schwarztrauber, a retired admiral in nearby Osterville, says putting the day first "makes eminently more sense," adding: "It's the way of the world."
This is true.But the move to international date-lines strikes some American holdouts as a needless concession to standardization wrought by pretentious one-worlders. "It's snooty and it's not the American way," says Margaret Harris, principal of the Owl School in Washington, where grammar-school students learn the month-first method. Gary B. Larson, a proof-reader and grammar maven in Seattle, says people who have switched to the international style are "sell-outs trying to be highfalutin."
The shift is getting its biggest boost from the high-technology community, which has been pushing to standardise dates because a single format avoids computer confusion. Microsoft Corpn. has dumped the US style used in early Windows software and is urging outside software developers to put the month in the middle when writing code. The day-first format also is gaining converts among a growing number of US globetrotters sick of being out of sync.
Merrill Lynch & Co. adopted the international style for all its research reports lastyear. On the US-invented Internet, international dating is now widely favoured. Plug a query into the US Alta Vists search engine, and the results will be tagged day-first.
The Webster's New World College Dictionary still favours "June 6,1944" - to pick a date - as the proper form. But the dictionary's executive editor, Michael Agnes, says 06 June 1944 makes more sense because the day, month and year are ranked from smallest to largest units. "There's a logic to it," says Agnes, an unabashed dating multilateralist who says the dictionary will change if enough Americans switch.
Both the Modern Language Association style guide and the Chicago Manual of Style support the day-first format. "You get rid of the comma that way," says Joseph Gibaldi, director of book acquisitions for the MLA in New York.Historians and government officials can't say for sure exactly when the renegade month-first system was adopted, or why the Americans picked it up. Before the Revolutionary War, most colonists wrote their datesthe way their rulers back home in England did: day first. The American style began catching on in the late 18th century as a small act of rebellion against the English crown, culminating in the emphatic "July 4, 1776" affixed atop the Declaration of Independence, says Mark Smith, a history professor at the University of South Carolina.
The month-first system has prevailed ever since. The US military made a retreat when it switched back to Euro-dating in 1943, partly to avoid confusion when communicating with the Allies during World War II. "It's so much clearer to say `20 January'" says Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer and author.
Donald S. Sullivan, chief of time and frequency for the US Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology, says the month-first system was never officially mandated by the US government. "Someone started doing it, and it became practice," he says.US customs forms were changed to request international-style dates in 1995. Before that, theforms didn't specify how travellers should write their birth dates and the day's date, so people did it all sorts of ways, confusing the daylights out of customs officials, according to Dean Boyd, a US Department of Customs spokesman.
But Stephen O'Leary, an investment banker in Boston, says the new forms aren't much better. He often mistakenly uses the month-first style when making his customs declarations, since the new requirement is "so illogical to the American mind."
Dating the American way is especially confounding to computers because many software programs are tripped up by punctuation. A computer that sees a date written as May 20, 01 might not know whether the entry is May 20, 2001 or May 2001, says Daniel S. Bricklin, a software developer who helped invent the computerised spread-sheet. Shoving the month in themiddle is unambiguous, says Bricklin, who now writes all his documents using the international method.
The US format "is quite obviously crazy and also quite dangerous," says MarkusKuhn, a computer researcher at the University ofCambridge in England. Since 06/01/99 can mean either June 1 or the 6th of January, Kuhn says the renegade American style can cause global chaos.
And confusion. Soon after arriving in Boston two years ago, Peter Torkelsson, a Swede from Gothenberg, was given a dental appointment for 03/04. A benighted Torkelsson arrived for his appointment on April 3, a month late.
Nancy E. Lowd, a business-development executive at Harvard Translations Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, also learned about US unconventionalism the hard way. She once helped arrange airline tickets for European colleagues, but a US travel agent thought 03-02 meant March 2, not February 3. The gaffe wasn't caught until the last minute, and the entourage was forced to pay a fee to reschedule, prompting one of the Europeans to place an angry call to Lowd asking, "What the hell is wrong with you?"
As if confusion between the two systems weren't enough, a small but influential band of globalorder-makers is pushing an entirely new dating system. The new format, called ISO 8601, puts the year first, month second and day last. ISO 8601 was adopted in 1988 by the International Organisation for Standardisation, a 130-nation, Geneva-based federation dedicated to global conformity.
Paul Devalier, a business analyst in Chicago, has been using ISO 8601 for several months and thinks it's the only rational system around. Devalier says he is "trying to educate as many people as possible" to adopt the year-first format.
He recently wrote to his credit-card company, First USA, urging it to print his monthly statements using the new method. When First USA didn't make the change, Devalier cancelled his card.
(The Asian Wall Street Journal)
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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