• Wikipedia, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal , Friday, November 28, 2008 11 AM

It's Black Friday. I know because the clock radio seared the fact into my cerebellum with a hokey advertising skit this morning (I can't remember who was advertising what, having hit the snooze button). Of course, we've been seeing headlines and hearing reports about Black Friday for days, and not just in the trade press. Since when did such an inside-baseball term become part of the vernacular? It's as if people other than surgeons were walking around talking about traffic "infarctions" on the way to the mall.

Wikipedia is helpful, as always, and hopefully reliable on this one. We all vaguely remember Black Tuesday from the stock market crash of 1929, and there was a Black Friday in an earlier financial panic in the 1860s. Then, in the 1960s, the Philadelphia police started referring to the day after Thanksgiving as Black Friday because of all of the traffic infarctions they had to deal with.

Wikipedia cites newspaper articles from as early as 1975 using the term to describe the day as the one when retailers purportedly go into the black. Still, am I alone in thinking that not only is the horse out of the barn this year but that there's a full-blown stampede in the general media?

One other tidbit: "The news media frequently refer to Black Friday as the busiest retail shopping day of the year, but this is not always accurate," Wikipedia says with sources duly cited. "While it has been one of the busiest days in terms of customer traffic, in terms of actual sales volume, from 1993 through 2001 Black Friday was usually the fifth to tenth busiest day."

Most of the business sections across the nation led with some variety of a Black Friday story this morning, of course. The Chicago Tribune had an interesting, if inevitable, twist: "If you're going to be out shopping on Black Friday in the Chicago area, we want to hear your stories and see your photos from the front lines. We'll share highlights on our Black Friday blog," it says. Readers can submit by Twitter or email.

A piece in the Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reports that today "could be black for retailers in more ways than one ... it could be the moment when some accept reality and start making plans to scale back." Unfortunately, many will fact hefty lease-termination fees as they attempt to do so .

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