From Wikipedia. "The adjective endian has its origin in the writings of 18th century Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift. In the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels, he portrays the conflict between sects of Lilliputians divided into those breaking the shell of a boiled egg from the big end or from the little end. He called them the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians."
In date formats, we commonly have the little-endian date format, DD/MM/YYYY.
In China, the convention is big-endian. YYYY/MM/DD. This is a good idea. It means that a set of dates can be easily and automatically sorted.
I think that it is only in America, just to be perverse, they use a middle-endian format, MM/DD/YYYY, which makes no sense whatsoever.
Just like using a temperature scale, Fahrenheit, which was based on 0°F being the temperature at the bottom of a particular well somewhere, and 100°F, being based on the temperature taken from a particular deer's rectum. Miles and feet and inches etc have similar arbitrary bases. Only in America, Liberia and Myanmar are imperial measures used, plus the UK, where they muddle along with an insane mixture of two systems, despite having supposedly "gone metric" some 50 years ago.
See also, "When NASA Lost a Spacecraft Due to a Metric Math Mistake".
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