Cuspy

[muckefuck]

The Lake was beautiful today, grey and choppy. The whitecaps weren't just near shore but went back all the way to the horizon. And the grey--I don't know how to describe it. It was muddy and yet brilliant all at the same time.

That's more or less how I feel--muddy and choppy. I want this day to be over so I can begin my holiday, but I'm not really too sure what to do with it. Tomorrow is sewn up, obviously, and then we have dinner plans for Friday. But after that? I'm torn between really needing to shop and wanting to be anywhere else but when a million other people are doing the same thing.

Speaking of which, does anyone remember when "Black Friday" became common parlance? I've been familiar with the term for years through the community customers_suck, but I've always considered it a bit of retail slang on a par with "floorspace" and "two-bite checkback". So I was more than a little taken aback to see several ads for "Black Friday Sales" while watching Glee last night. Seems to me a shockingly quick rehabilitation of an intensely pejorative term.

And speaking of Glee, it continues to be a complete hot mess. What a waste of Carol Burnett! Also I spent the whole treacly wedding scene praying for the moment when Kurt got the news that Shoroffsky had tried to kill himself after being expelled. Alas, in vain. Thank goodness there was an hour of Raising Hope afterwards to rinse the taste of corn syrup from my mouth.

Comments

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

The urban folklore I've always heard around "Black Friday" is that it's the day that most retail businesses see their ledgers go into the black. If that really is the origin of the term, it's a little ironic but maybe not as pejorative as all that.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

....aaaand we're both wrong. Wikipedia not only has an explanation for this, shockingly enough it has a citation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I was right about the longstanding pejorative nature of it, however: "'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."

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Point.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Now I'm just waiting until Macy's starts advertising its "Genocide Day" sale.

[sconstant.livejournal.com]

1952:

http://www.google.com/search?tbs=bks%3A1&q="absenteeism+The+company+added+Black+Friday"

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Nice!

[lhn.livejournal.com]

A skim suggests that 2000 or so is when news outlets started to feel comfortable just writing "Black Friday" rather than qualifying it with "as retailers call it" or getting a quote from some retail employee (or before that, it seems, cop or cab driver) using the term.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

This is why Scots traditionally exchange gifts on New Years!

[lhn.livejournal.com]

In the US, while Christmas has extended its tendrils back to Halloween and beyond, the end of Thanksgiving still informally serves as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, hence Black Friday. Is there any similar chronological boundary in Canada, or does it just sort of ramp up organically?

(I'd expect your Thanksgiving is too early, though given that some stores start to show Christmas stuff here after our Labor Day these days...)