Communication Breakdown

Black Friday

The day after Thanksgiving, to me, has always been a day of rest and digest. Sit inside, watch holiday films, clean house and get some things done before the schedule resumes its normal, breakneck speed. However, for the first time in my life, I have actually participated in the black friday festivities. Granted, I did not fight any lines or purchase anything at a discounted price. I just needed batteries for my camera! Why should I endure the endless crowds and otherwise predatory madness to achieve something as trivial as a power source? However, I did leave my safe haven of a living room just to say that I did.

But where does the term black friday come from? Before it referred to the start of the holiday shopping season, black friday was a financial stock market fiasco in 1869, when all matters of financial transactions were experiencing difficulty. I'm no economics guru, but in literature, black typically signifies darkness, or evil. This seems to be an appropriate application of metaphor to the 1869 financial crisis. Shortly after, black friday began to refer to the traffic surrounding the travel homeward the day after thanksgiving. In terms of accounting, black ink typically refers to profit, or the amount of money that is saved, whereas red represents money that is owed, or not present in the account, such as an overdraft.  In the mid to late 60s, black friday combined the accounting definition of black with the crowded element to come to its current meaning. The 60s marked the stages of early infancy for the triumvirate of radio, television, and print advertising, and so it seems logical that retail services would peak at mass hysteria at this time.

Perform

The word performance hold a strange sect in my personal vocabulary. As a dancer, to perform can mean anything from standing in front of an audience, executing basic technique, or the attempt to imitate some emotion in the shaping of body or face. When thinking about drama and the dramatic, performance suggests an element of make believe, pretend, or something fake. Myself and some classmates crafted a flashmob that was a fake wedding proposal, which was both a performance to garner attention from those around us, as well as an implication of a fake relationship. Our goal was to try to convince those innocent bystanders that these two people were honestly embarking on the next stage in their lives together. (In fact, we had some concerns about how seriously people would react to the scene; Vy, our actress, took measures to inform her boyfriend that this was for a class to prevent him from reacting in anger).

So, is there something inherent in the definition of performance that implies behavior that is not entirely genuine, even if it is intended to appear that way? The word is derived from very early French, and the original definition implies the completion or carrying out of a specific task. It is not until the popular emergence of the theater in the 1600s (late Renaissance time period) that the association with theatrics became engaged in the definition of performance.

Thus, a double meaning emerges again in a single word: to perform a task is to complete it, to perform a scene is to embody a specific character, emotion, or feeling for an audience. The latter definition corresponds more artisically, which brings up greater questions about the nature of art. Is art real? What is real? Certainly, all art (because it seems impossible to generalize in this way) is not a realistic representation of human experience. However, in order to be relatable, it must have a recognizable and relateable element of truth in which humans can connect and engage with it.

This idea leads me back to the flashmob. We took a human experience, one that is particularly life changing, and performed it in a public place. The performance elicited feelings of distraction, mild interest, disbelief, and confusion. Was the performance overall successful? I'll let you be the judge:

Frigid

In light of the oncoming winter weather, this week's word is frigid. Unlike most of our previous words, frigid has Latin origins. The word frigidus means to chill, to be cold, and stems off into various forms and tenses, all implying something frozen or otherwise low in temperature.

Old English, on the other hand, claims the origins of the word cold. How can one civilization create a phrase that is used to specify and describe another? Latin, through the years, has been the language of the learned, whereas middle or old English were commonplace languages spoken by many and transcribed by only scholars. Therefore, it is logical that the masses would use a word to describe the basic feeling of temperature, whereas scholarly types would think critically enough to adjust the use of a word beyond just physical feeling.

Additionally, frigid has evolved to explain attitude, and those who are shy or unresponsive have often been referred to as frigid. This connection is derived from Shakespeare, because the phrase "cold hearted" first appeared in the dialogue of his plays. The person whose behavior is frigid is said to have ice around their heart. Luckily, this is only an analogy!