Hot Take: MM/DD/YYYY > DD/MM/YYYY

I woke up in a cold sweat when it came to me.

The date was July 17, 2025.

Why did I say it like that and not 17 July 2025? Is it because I am a stubborn American? No, it turns out, I am stubborn for sentence structure.

I watch a lot of reels and Youtube shorts and there is a man who speaks a lot about language, word origins, English, sentence structure, and more. While I was never a great student growing up, my parents drilled into me the importance of speaking well. My father was a journalist and my mother spent several years of my childhood getting her Masters degree, but that's besides the point.

As an adult, I came across the list of the qualifying adjectives in a sentence. It goes as the following:

Determiner: (e.g., a, an, the, this, that, my, your)

Quantity: (e.g., one, few, several)

Opinion: (e.g., beautiful, interesting, difficult)

Size: (e.g., big, small, tall, short)

Age: (e.g., old, new, young)

Shape: (e.g., round, square, rectangular)

Color: (e.g., red, blue, green)

Origin: (e.g., French, American, Japanese)

Material: (e.g., wooden, cotton, metal)

Purpose/Qualifier: (e.g., sleeping bag, running shoes)

Noun: (e.g., person, place, thing, concept)

When I woke up in my (determiner) cold (material) sweat; The date was July (determiner noun of the month) 17 (quantity number of days), 2025 (age of the year)!

That's why it sounds correct that way. July in the predicate of the sentence is describing the date. July may be a proper noun, but the date is being used to describe the date; same as the number 17 and 2025. Describing it as DD/MM/YYYY isn't about thinking of it as smallest amount of time to largest, if that were true, we would read clocks as minutes THEN HOURS, but we don't do that.

We read it as month, day, year because it makes sense grammatically, not numerically.

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