A flash of sudden understanding (I can't believe I was that mistaken for so many years)...

[tgif007]

Have you ever had one of those moments of sudden illumination, where - while the world may not have suddenly turned upside down - something you've taken for granted for years or decades suddenly turns out to not only have been wrong, but so foolishly wrong that you can't believe that you ever believed it? This evening I had the second such event

Comments

[thnidu]

"that I was quite possibly the only person in the entire world to be so deluded as to be confused in this matter."

I seriously doubt it. A classic parallel is the verb "misle", pronounced "mizzle" or "meisel"/"my-zle". It is the present tense of misread "misled", which is actually the past tense of "mislead". Millions of native English speakers, including yours truly, have had this nonexistent verb in our recognition vocabulary for years into our adulthood.

Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody

Origin of the name "Black Friday"

[anonymous]

In this day and age, whenever you want to find the origin of a name, just go to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)#Origin_of_the_name_.22Black_Friday.22

Re: Origin of the name "Black Friday"

[anonymous]

let me put that as a link:
Origin of the name "Black Friday"

Re: Origin of the name "Black Friday"

[anonymous]

Still didn't work. Oh well, I guess they're blocking HTML (even though it worked in the preview).

[tgif007]

Turns out that I was partially wrong on my "Black Friday" insight.

While that is indeed the current spin put on the name, it originally
did have a negative connotation.

Black Friday as a term has been used in multiple contexts,
going back to the nineteenth century, where it was associated with a
financial crisis in 1869. The earliest uses of "Black Friday" to mean
the day close to Thanksgiving come from or reference Philadelphia
and refer to the heavy traffic on that day. The earliest known
reference to "Black Friday" (in this sense), found by Bonnie
Taylor-Blake of the American Dialect Society, refers to Black Friday
1965 and makes the Philadelphia origin explicit:

JANUARY 1966 -- "Black Friday" is the name which the
Philadelphia
Police Department has given to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day.
It is not a term of endearment to them. "Black Friday" officially opens
the Christmas shopping season in center cityand it usually brings massive traffic jams and over-crowded sidewalks