A friend is putting together a certificate and came to me about the structure of the date on it and once I told her, I started to wonder.
How would you (correctly) do, “on the f(or F?)irst day of April, (or no comma?) 2002”?
…on the first day of April, 2002.
The word “day” is optional.
No comma when it’s just Month 2002.
‘First’ is not capitalized.
It’s kind of awkward to say, “on the first (day) of April 2002.” I think “on April 1, 2002” rolls off the tongue and just plain looks better. But you didn’t ask for input on that. 
With a ceremonial certificate you can pretty much ignore capitalization rules in the interest of drama. The First Day of April looks more impressive than the first day of April. Of course if you really want to go off the hook, try Monday, the First Day of April, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Two. As for the comma, I think it’s necessary pretty much any time you have a date including the year.
I hate that all I can lay my hands on right now is an online source, but I disagree, and here’s why.
May be just a bit further over the top than she wants to go, but it works for me.
And thanks everybody.
The comma between the day and date is there for a purpose – to separate the two numbers (“January 22 1990” can create confusion, especially if the space is small). If you don’t have two numbers to separate, you don’t need a comma. Thus “April 2002” is correct.
Of course, if you write the date the proper way as 1 April 2002 there’s no problem - you don’t need any commas to tell you the difference between the day and year, as RealityChuck suggested.
Which brings me to the main point of replying to this post. Why do Americans say/write the month before the day? (Just one of those annoying things that crops up when non-Americans use American software, like MS. This makes it very confusing sometimes).
Or looking at it from the other perspective, why do Australians (or most Aussies I know) - not too sure how other parts of the world handle this weighty issue - say/write dates as dd/mm/yy, whereas Americans use mm/dd/yy?
I believe we (Americans) write the month first then day because that’s how we usually speak. We will more often say, “How about meeting on May 7th?” and rarely, “How about meeting on the seventh of May?”
So as usual with us Yanks, form follows function. And as for why Australians do it the other way, I imagine it comes from Great Britian and I have a hunch France before that.
Only we civilian Americans use the month-day-year format. Our military uses the international method of day, month, and year.
…“international method of day, month, and year” … says it all realy.
Last time I checked, the ISO standard format for
date/time (in the context of computer programming,
that is) was YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS, where T is
the letter T. So the “international” standard would
be year-month-day (with four digit year).
iirc, dd/mm/yy[yy] is the european standard.
I correct myself, the french and spanish write it
yyyy-mm-dd as well.