Paint it Black on Friday
by
Howard Richler
This year
Thanksgiving in the United States will be celebrated on November 24th
and will be followed the next day by perhaps the most mercantile day on the calendar
– Black Friday. For shoppers this marks the beginning of the orgy of sale
hunting that culminates at Christmas. Black Friday gets its designation from
the fact that as of this day many stores and companies that previously were “in
the red” are able to undergo a virtual transubstantiation where they morph “in
the black.” These colour designations come from the world of accounting where red
ink is used in a ledger to designate a loss and black ink is used to register a
profit. One would think that these two
terms would have received lexicographic recognition concurrently, however “in
the red” is first cited in the OED in
1907 while “In the black” makes its debut only in 1923.
To my
knowledge, from a linguistic perspective, Black Friday marks the only instance
of a positive connotation of the adjectival use of “black” in the English
language. Obviously, most uses are neutral and refer only to the colour of
various objects. However, in its many descriptions of the word black as an adjective the OED displays the following meanings: “gloomy,”
“dirty,” “burned,” “evil” and “hateful.” To “look black” means “to frown” and black is
used as an intensifier in several expressions that carry a sense of severity,
such as the terms “black afraid” or “black angry.”
The first OED citation of Black Friday with a
commercial sense dates from 1961 when we read in the Dec 18th edition of Publication News in New York, “For
downtown merchants throughout the nation, the biggest shopping days normally
are the two following Thanksgiving Day… In Philadelphia, it beca[H1] me customary for officers to refer to
the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday.” The OED’s next citation is from the New York Times on November 21, 1975: “Philadelphia
police and bus drivers call it ‘Black Friday’ – that
day each year between Thanksgiving Day and the Army-Navy game. It is the
busiest shopping and traffic day of the year in the Bicentennial city.”
So as we can
see from the two citations, there is a clear Philadelphia provenance to the
expression and also one that relates to the traffic in that city caused by the
multitudinous shoppers. It also seems that for some people the blackness attached
to Friday represented a humorous reference to the congestion caused in downtown
Philadelphia.
The OED does show an even earlier citation for
Black Friday that ties it to the Thanksgiving season; it has nothing to do with
shopping but rather the sense of blackness refers to the great degree of absenteeism
found in factories following Thanksgiving.
The November 1951 edition of Factory
Management & Maintenance reported
“’Friday-after-Thanksgiving-itis’ is a disease second only to the bubonic
plague in its effects…When you decide you want to sweeten up the holiday kitty,
pick Black Friday to add to the list…Friday after Thanksgiving is the company’s
seventh paid holiday.”
The OED shows several other examples of
non-Thanksgiving-related Black Fridays and unsurprisingly none of them are
particularly profitable. The first time the designation was used was in 1610
and it didn’t refer to a specific Friday but was used in English schools to
refer to any Friday in which a general examination was administered. From this,
we know that students have been “testaphobic” for over 400 years. The next time
the designation was used was to mark December 6, 1745, when the landing of Charles
Edward Stuart, a.k.a “the Young
Pretender” was announced in London. This
date is marked in infamy as it signifies the Young Pretender’s leading an
insurrection to restore his family to the throne of Great Britain. History is
undecided whether this rebellion caused any great panic but this didn’t prevent
this particular Black Friday from receiving extensive lexicographic
recognition. The other designation of Black Friday comes from the world of
finance and occurs almost concurrently in Great Britain and the USA and at a
date much earlier than one would suppose. The first one occurred on May 11,
1866 when a commercial panic followed the collapse of the London banking house
Overend, Gurney & Co. Then on Sept 24, 1869 the term was used to refer to the
financial panic on Wall Street that was precipitated by the introduction of a
large amount of governmental gold into the financial market, with the aim of
making it harder for anyone to corner the gold market.
I suspect other
Black Fridays will achieve lexicographic recognition in the future. In fact,
following the Brexit vote on Thursday, June 23rd, I espied these two
headlines: The Independent-
Brexit: Black Friday For Financial Markets Sparked By EU Vote and CNN
Money: Britain’s Black Friday Is Here. Now What?
Richler’s
latest book Wordplay:Arranged and
Deranged Wit was published by
Ronsdale Press in May 2016
