The scourge of auto superscript

Over the years, the way we write dates has been evolving. Or should I say was evolving, because I think Microsoft has been working to reverse the trend.

What am I on about? The little suffixes after the day numeral – like 1st, 2nd. Following the United States, the UK had begun leaving these little letters off, so that “3rd June” can also be written “3 June”.

It looks cleaner and less Victorian in my view, like unpunctuated addresses. But nowadays, word processors like Microsoft Word will often give these suffixes a superscript format automatically. So if you type “4th July” it magically changes to “4^th July”. Now, I know the real culprit here is the person who typed in “th” in the first place. However I think it would be better if the word processor deleted these unnecessary letters, instead of fancying them up!