How do you read a number like 1234? "One thousand two hundreds thirty four", big endian.
Most (all?) Western languages say out their numbers in big endian, as do East Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It is only natural that we write down our numbers in big endian, it can be argued that the mistake was making little endian CPUs.
Little endian: byte N has value 256^N, bit n has value 2^n.
Big endian: byte N has value 256^(L-N), bit n has value 2^n or 2^(l-n) depending on the architecture (some effectively have little bit-endian but big byte-endian) and where L and l are the byte and bit size of the whole integer respectively.
Design hardware or even write arbitrary precision routines, and you'll quickly realise that "big endian is backwards, little endian is logical".
As bits are generally not addressable / not ordered, it makes no sense to call CPU architecture big/little bit-endian. That makes sense only for serial lines/buses.
Most (all?) Western languages say out their numbers in big endian, as do East Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It is only natural that we write down our numbers in big endian, it can be argued that the mistake was making little endian CPUs.