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November 2007Just Foolin' AroundThe traditional start of the holiday shopping season, the day after Thanksgiving, is known as Black Friday. Although that combination phrase does not appear as an entry of its own in the Unabridged Dictionary, black Friday does appear as an example used to illustrate the sense of the adjective black meaning "marked by the occurrence of disaster." It also has been suggested that the use of black in Black Friday may be related to "making a profit," as opposed to the use of red, meaning "showing a loss." This theory seems reasonable, but evidence supporting it is spotty. If shopping on that busiest of days spells disaster to you, why not instead while away the day fooling around with color references on Merriam-Webster Unabridged? We started with black, but you can choose whatever you'd like. We began by selecting the Unabridged as our reference, clicking on Advanced Search and typing black into the Main Entry field. That produced 679 entries; we tried to narrow that down through the Advanced Search options (by adding noun in the Function field) and cut things down to a manageable 25 entries. Our list ranged from black and tan to western black-legged tick and included black hole, black humor, and black ice. Do you know what a black crappie is? How about a black blizzard? |