Destiny walked into a linguistic buzzsaw during a recent stream after taking aim at the European way of writing dates.
While reacting to a headline that used the format “6 August,” Destiny mocked the phrasing, arguing it sounded off in English. In his view, the written form should line up with how the date is spoken aloud—and to him, “6 August” didn’t cut it.
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A European jumped in almost immediately with a very simple counter: “Do you say ‘Dollar 5’ when you write $5?” The point being that written English is full of shorthand that doesn’t map onto speech, so mocking “6 August” for the same reason doesn’t really hold up.
Viewers piled on with a second example that hit even closer to home: the Fourth of July. Americans use the standard month-first format year-round, but the country’s biggest holiday is universally spoken day-first. Even U.S. English breaks its own rules when convention calls for it.
The “6 August” form Destiny took issue with is standard British headline style. In everyday speech, Brits and Irish speakers would usually say “the 6th of August” or “6th August.” Newspapers just strip out the “th” and “of” to save space, the same way headlines drop “the” and “a” all the time.
From there the conversation opened up into the wider format war. The U.S. sticks with MM/DD/YYYY. Most of Europe uses DD/MM/YYYY. Anyone who works with files, databases, or logs will tell you ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) beats both because it sorts cleanly and leaves no room for confusion between 06/08 and 08/06.
