Why is October 11, 2000 written as either 10/11/00 or 11/10/00? Seems like the US Government and the Europeans like to use 11 October, where as most of us plain folk in the United States like to use October 11? Who’s right?
In Europe: 30.08.2000 is the 30th of August, this year. (makes sense when you think about it)
In the USofA: 8/30/00 was a few days ago (makes sense only in a verbal way)
As for why?
I think it’s got something to do with the metric system.
As for why the government does it? They have to. Otherwise things get really confusing when they say “Get out of Kuwait by 04-05-92 or else we’ll bomb ya!” …and then show up a month early.
Part of the difference is because the European system uses cardinal days, while the U.S. system uses ordinal days.
“17 October 1945,” which is a European-style date, is pronounced “Seventeen October nineteen forty-five.”
“October 17, 1945,” which is a U.S.-style date, is pronounced “October seventeenth, nineteen forty-five.” It also has that extra comma before the year for some unfathomable reason.
let’s all use Star Dates. 
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Moving to General Questions.
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The “right” way of writing the date is the way your intended audience will understand.
Personally I find the day-month-year style somewhat more logical, because the items are in increasing order of length. (Year-month-day is also used in some contexts.) However, I don’t think it’s important enough to get my panties in a knot over.
The reason for the comma when writing a date like “September 7, 2000” is simply to give an additional visual separation between the two numbers. That is not necessary when writing “7 September 2000” because the numbers are separated by a word.
I work in a multinational office (US, England, Aussie) and it gets to be fun around this time when the day and month have close numbers. I agree that the day/month/year is more logical because there are days in a month, months in a year. What we do is just say 07Sept00. That clears it up pretty quickly.
My “customer” (a US gov’t office) is having us input and output dates as “2000-09-07” for September 7, 2000. This has some logic to it, as you can sort easily by date since the three fields are written from most significant to least significant.
As far as I can tell, the USA is out of step with the rest of the world in putting the month first, and also in making calendars with Sunday showing up as the first day of the week.
I personally always write “7 sep 2000” to avoid confusion.
In my humble opinion (yes, I know this thread’s currently in “General Questions”), dates and times should be written most-significant-field first: 2000-09-07 12:40:42.245. date(1) tells me this is called ISO-8601 format, and I like it.
I would write 11 Oct 00. Unless I was writing it in // form, in which case it would be 10/11/00.
I think the question was why is there a comma after 2000? I don’t believe that comma is necessary, unless the sentence otherwise calls for it.
Ditto.
> the USA is out of step with the rest of the world
No, the other countries are out of step with us. Not only do they use the wrong date format, they talk funny, too.
Hmmm…wouldn’t that cause some confusion with people who received “11 Oct 00” first, and then “10/11/00”? If I saw “11 Oct 00” first, I’d assume you were using UK/European-style dating, so when I received correspondence with “10/11/00”, I’d think it meant “10 Nov 00.”
It is standard format in our labs to write out the month with 3 letters: 11 Oct 00. This helps in reducing confusion when we prepare banding reports at the end of the year. This became protocol after we had a visitng ornithologist from overseas fill in her data sheets in the first weeks of May using numbers only. Since we report many hundred records, we didn’t catch the inconsistencies and we reported her banding dates incorrectly (fortunately Bird Banding Lab caught it and gently slapped our hands).
I also like the progress of day to month to year.
As soon as I finished school I switched from the month-day-year format to the day-month-year format. It just felt natural to me. Along with that strike of independence, I usually follow the natural inclination to spell flavor, honor, labor, color, humor and neighbor as, flavour, honour, labour, colour, humour, and neighbour.