Explained here:
Mad Hatter Day is 10/6. The date was chosen from the illustrations by John Tenniel in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, wherein the Mad Hatter is always seen wearing a hat bearing a slip of paper with the notation "In this style 10/6". We take this as inspiration to behave in the style of the Mad Hatter on 10/6 (which is October 6 here, although in Britain Mad Hatter Day occurs on June 10...but I digress...)As I searched this topic on the 'net today, it was interesting to see how many observers misinterpret the 10/6 on his hat as being either a style number ("The Mad Hatter’s top hat, according to Lewis Carroll, was of the 10/6 style") or worse ("my birthdate (10/6) is on his hat although I think that is his hat size!"). The correct interpretation, of course, is that "the paper in the Mad Hatter's Hat was really an order to make a hat in the style shown, to cost ten shillings sixpence."
Mad Hatter Day began in Boulder, CO, in 1986, among some computer folk who had nothing better to do. It was immediately recognized as valuable because they caused less damage than if they'd been doing their jobs.
Reposted.
I had always thought it was as if the hat had been grabbed off of a display of various hats. Looking at this hat, "in this style, 10/6" The next hat over, "in this style, 10/8" and so forth.
ReplyDeleteI had always thought it was the hat size being shown in a nonsense fraction 10 over 6 in a display of apparent madness. Thanks For the enlightenment.
ReplyDeleteI'm delighted that my Mad Hatter Day page is still amusing the internet after all these years.
ReplyDeleteIt just keeps going!
DeleteCMU eventually shut down the account where you originally found my Mad Hatter page. I moved it to an archive and there's a redirect, so it's still accessible, or you can update to the direct link: https://ari-blenkhorn.github.io/old_cmu_site/madHatter.html
I believe I have successfully updated the link to your new url. Thanks for the heads-up, Ari.
DeleteThe correct colloquialisms are "ten and six", or "ten shillings AND sixpence" or even "ten bob and a tanner". Nowadays it's just the rather boring and significantly devalued "55p".
ReplyDeleteyer absotively correct - it is the price of the hat, not a date.
DeleteI-)
Pedantically you shd further devalue the conversion to 52.5p for accuracy. As 50p = 10/- = ten shillings; so 5p is a shilling in old money not sixpence. Lewis Carroll loaded his books with clever clogs puzzles and I've vaguely wondered at the fact that 10/6 = half-a-guinea and what that might mean.
DeleteI don't think there is anything hidden there beyond the fact, known to all of Carroll's original readers, that upscale tradesmen always priced their goods/services in guineas -- in effect, at a 5% premium.
DeleteHalf a guinea in the 1860s would be (very, very) roughly USD200 today. A lot of money -- but, in that time and place, a bargain for a hat. Clothing was relatively much more expensive then than now, but also of higher quality, and it would be kept much longer and repaired as many times as necessary.
I thought it was some kind of betting slip.
ReplyDeleteover on the continent, don't they use the '10th of june' date convention? :-)
ReplyDeleteI-)
yes, and here is OZ
DeletePretty much everywhere in the world other than the U.S. would see 10/6 as being the tenth of june if seen as a date. The label in the hat, to any british person of the pre-decimal currency era, (started in 1970) would see that label for what it is, a price label.
ReplyDeleteConsequently, the idea that the tenth of October should be 'Mad Hatter Day' makes no sense at all, and is thus, in the spirit of the 'Alice in Wonderland' books, perfectly cromulent.
Now I know. Missed Broderick Crawford Day this year. 10-4.
ReplyDelete2150 bye
DeleteAlthough I first read it as "Miss Broderick Crawford Day"
Which I thought would be a mighty odd celebration.
Irregular Webcomic did a bit on the topic of mad hatters, here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3838.html
The two characters at the table are Death of Inhaling Hat-Making Chemicals and one of his colleagues. In IW's world, very specific Deaths are sent out to collect souls, e.g., Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs, Death of Being Sat On by a Giant Frog, etc. IW uses various plotlines, like the Pirate sequence, the Space Adventure sequence, the Steve-the-adventurer sequence, the RPG sequence, etc. The one set of characters all the sequences have in common are the Deaths.
The entire strip is done with Lego characters and pieces and photo-image manipulation. When the strip creator, David Morgan-Mar, adds a strip postscript and rattles on about some scientific topic or other, it's a treat.
Eek. Forgot to sign: 'Tis I: Lurker111.
DeleteAlso, I checked and Hat-Making Chemicals' colleague is, in fact, ol' Fireballs.
I wonder if Americans find their unique method of reading and writing dates, equally confusing as most of us the other side of the pond?
ReplyDeleteSurely it's logical to read from left to right, as we do in English, smallest to largest; day, month, year? Even largest to smallest, would at least cast no doubt as to what was being portrayed. Month, day, year seems like a fairly obtuse way of reading and writing dates.
I'm amused that you think the American public forms its opinions based on logic and common sense.
DeleteMost opinions in Americans are formed off one one of several basis. First is 'tradition,' but in reality are fetishized views of the past based on each person's warped view of history (since actual teaching of history is so poor in the US), the second is 'American exceptionalism' which is based of the arrogant belief that the US is the best country in the wold, even though all objective measures contradict this (see item 1) and that no solutions found by other countries could ever be adequate, so we reinvent the wheel every time to satisfy our own egos, and the newest is 'because the internet says so' which is an increasing large group of people, not all being young, that has fallen into the trap of accepting everything they see on their favorite internet 'news' site as gospel and following it without any attempt at verification.
DeleteMonth, day, year makes perfect sense.to me. The month mediates between a short amount of time (a day, too little) and a long amount of time (a year, too long). This is helpful for orientation purposes. As with time, we don't state it as seconds, minutes and the hour. We begin with the hour, a broad enough orientation to create a context for the minute.
ReplyDeleteI'm not one for reflexively defending the US. We just switched to year-round "daylight savings time"--idiocy IMHO.
Month, day, year makes perfect sense.to me.
DeleteOf course the only logical way to put a date is year-month-day, just like we write the time: bigger units first. What's the point of knowing something happened at 8 minutes past the hour, if you don't know what hour, what day, what month and whether it was in 3495BC or 2022CE?
But people don't really do logic as much as people think.
[Note: in Dutch saying the time can be enormously illogical. It can be "ten-past-half" in Dutch. And that would be 20 minutes before the *next* hour, not 40 minutes after the previous. If you think that "half" some hour should logically be half-passed, as it is in current English, I invite you to read some Sherlock Holmes and see the opposite (and correct) use of "half" some hour.]
I don’t think the bill to allow year-round DST (Sunshine Preservation Act) has passed in the House. They put off voting on the bill in July. The Senate passed it in March.
Delete"...if you don't know what hour, what day, what month and whether it was in 3495BC or 2022CE?" I think you are arguing my point. There's such a thing as too little and too much information in all things. The art is to find a way to communicate with just the right amount, in some order that works. This is logical, and also intuitive. Knowing the month first is a fine example of framing a date in a comprehensible unit of time--to reference millennia is useful if it's Julius Caesar's birthday I seek to frame, but not so much for a friend's, which I'm more inclined to associate with a season of the year, within the signature of a month. No number--1-31--can provide this context as I hear the date. When you think of a friend's birthday, is it a number (1-31) that comes to mind first, or a month? Months are named units of time with poetic resonance. This brings the number to life--and it ought to lead. Compare: He was born in January. He was born on 22. Which is an invitation?
DeleteNice
ReplyDeleteIt is well-known that Americans actually celebrate the 4th of July on April 7th.
ReplyDeleteThat is because it is so nice that we do it twice!
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