Dear Katia, please help me to correct any grammatical mistake in this post so I can show it to my fellow countryman. They are confused and are going on a wrong road of learning English. I feel obligated for leading them into a brighter future. I need to shove the Hammer of Grammar down their miserable throats!
Recently, on Vietnamese newspapers, I have read so many news about how some Vietnamese Universities have written incorrect grammar on the diplomas given to students. The above picture shows an example of what I just wrote. These news received many angry comments from the people who care about our nation education system. Many of them could easily spot the incorrectness in the word "verry", but failed miserably to see the unacceptable mistakes on the dates. Some even argued that they are not wrong, because this style of writing date has been seen by them many times before. They even used it in e-mails with their English customers and no one ever complaint. They said that it is the British-English style. To be more specific, we are talking about the postfix "th" after "26".
I had to face-palmed so hard that I almost broke my neck.
First of all, which part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain (the UK) are you talking about? According to the recent history of mankind, the UK has four different smaller states/regions: Wales, England, Scotland and Ireland. Also, you may not know this yet but each of those four parts speaks English in their own style. They accept different version of English, including the date and time style. So which part of the UK are you talking about? I am so confused.
However, I can tell you that in London, and in some certain English proficiency exams, people usually have no objection to your style of cutting of the postfix "th" after the day number in your date writing. Of course, it does not make your writing right in anyway. Here I even stressed on the word right (by writing it in Bold style) because it is my most important argument, and to make it clear from the term acceptable.
As said, writing day without the post-fix "th" is acceptable in many region and in many situation. After all, despite of any language rule, people are still the objective of acceptance to the way people write. I have no objection to that, but when some young and (probably) clueless people started to say it is also right, then I think I have to give my opinion out there.
Lets trace back to one of our first English lessons, in which we learned about the number and the numerical order. We know that 26 is a number, spelled twenty-six. We also know that 26th is a numerical order, spelled twenty-sixth. According to our lesson, if we say 26 Augusts then it means that we are talking about twenty six specific months (or twenty six years, in literature).However, if we say 26th August, then we are talking about one day only, just one day. Do you know why? Because we count every day in a month, and named them after their numerical order. Moreover, if any of us learned Discrete Math in university, we know that Language is basically a set of finite symbols that makes up the Vocabulary and a finite set of productions/rules that makes up the Grammar. What we learned in our first English lessons was the Grammar of English. No matter which country you are living in, there is one and only one Grammar of English. If you stray from it in anyway, you are either wrong or in the process of producing a new language, mathematically saying.
That would wrap up the basic grammar of English, now I will continue discussing about acceptability and rightness. We already are very aware of how many English speaking regions accept some certain ways people write English in some certain situations. For example, when you send you e-mail to your customer, the thing that your customer cares about is not how you write the sentences, but the goods/services you are providing them. That is why they may accept your minor mistakes. You may not know this but it will also make their life easier and happier because they do not have to argue with you on how your sentences are grammatically incorrect. However, if the documents you are sending to them are some government official documents, or law-related documents that may be of important to them, then they will shove the Hammer Of Grammar down your throat for your incompetent grammar. In many cases, documents must be written in a formal and official tone that including absolute rightness of grammar even if your whole company employees and employer accept your grammatical incorrect writing everyday. That is what I want to say about acceptability, which depends so much about the situation and the community. You can find more about it on Google, or any official or unofficial Oxford English guideline or documentation.
Coming to the discussion of rightness, there is no way I could prove the rightness of English grammar without using mathematics. But no worry, knowing the mathematical knowledge level of my potential readers, I would prefer to keep math at minimum so no one would question the validity of my method. So lets starts!
In Discrete Math, we have learned the way of Logical Conjunction, which basically to tell us that if we want to prove a statement, we must prove that our statement is true everywhere. Even if there is only one place in which our statement is not true, then the whole statement is false. In this case, we consider writing day in dates without post-fix "th" is true, and it is our statement. However, as said above, in some cases, that style of writing is not acceptable, like in law-related documents for example. Moreover, it also does not represent the meaning of numerical order. Therefore, it is false by definition, or we can say it is not right. Then what? How about day with post-fix "th" like 26th August? It is quite simple, if you can find any place that does not accept that way of writing, then it is not right. The real question is, can you find any counter example? Of course you can not, and never will. That is because it is a written rule in English Grammar. No matter where you live, no matter which community you are in, no matter which situation, it is always right. It is absolute right! Therefore, mathematically proven, 26th August is right and 26 August is wrong.
Finally, after explaining how that way of writing dates is wrong, I would want to give an advise to my fellow countrymen and countrywomen: if you learn anything, you should learn it by heart, and learn the right, original way of doing it. If you obtain your knowledge that way, you will be able to understand all the variations of that knowledge and figure out how they are different from the original one and how should you apply them into your study or your life. (I separate "study" and "life" into two different terms because, apparently, for people who like to spend time in studying like me, we have no life at all!)
Sincerely,
A Grammar Nazi
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