When someone asks you what date it is, no one says it’s 2025 May 5th.
We all know what year it is, and we all know what month we are in. It’s the day component that is usually the unknown.
Guilty of that myself this very day. I did it a very spectacular way too. Some coworkers came up to me and said “man, April was a busy month for you!” I boldly replied “and it ain’t even over yet!”
I was promptly corrected.
That’s locality of reference, though, similar to how you can say “here” or “there” for spatial coordinates. Everybody is aware of the year and month, so you omit it as given. The order of significance is still year, month, day.
Imagine if a harried time traveler jumped out of their time machine and asked you the date. Would it make sense to say, “Why, it’s the 1st.” (Or more possible, if a friend awoke from a coma.) If you ask somebody when they were born, most people will give the year at minimum. Of course, there are some weirdos out there, and you recognize them when you ask when they were born, and they say, “on a Tuesday.” Same for the date of the Norman invasion of Great Britain. If you don’t already have some sense of history, then knowing it happened about the 20th isn’t very edifying.
When someone asks you what date it is, no one says it’s 2025 May 5th. We all know what year it is, and we all know what month we are in. It’s the day component that is usually the unknown.
Literally had two coworkers today that did not realize it was May
Oh, yeah, guess it is.
Guilty of that myself this very day. I did it a very spectacular way too. Some coworkers came up to me and said “man, April was a busy month for you!” I boldly replied “and it ain’t even over yet!” I was promptly corrected.
That’s locality of reference, though, similar to how you can say “here” or “there” for spatial coordinates. Everybody is aware of the year and month, so you omit it as given. The order of significance is still year, month, day.
Imagine if a harried time traveler jumped out of their time machine and asked you the date. Would it make sense to say, “Why, it’s the 1st.” (Or more possible, if a friend awoke from a coma.) If you ask somebody when they were born, most people will give the year at minimum. Of course, there are some weirdos out there, and you recognize them when you ask when they were born, and they say, “on a Tuesday.” Same for the date of the Norman invasion of Great Britain. If you don’t already have some sense of history, then knowing it happened about the 20th isn’t very edifying.
Writing dates is usually in order to keep track for the future, when the year and month may be different.