Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by IIAOPSW on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @05:28AM (#34064008)

The real answer is that financial ledgers used to use black ink for positive numbers and red for negative, hence the terminology "in the red"/"in the black" to mean an enterprise is in debt or profitable. Black Friday was the day of the year where every department store would have so much business that it put them "in the black", even if they had just spent the entire previous part of the year "in the red".

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by chrisbaker98 on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @06:17AM (#34064359)

That's a good story, but according to Wikipedia this etymology was invented after the fact and isn't the real origin of the term (which is somewhat obscure.)

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by bregma on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @07:15AM (#34064848)

...and which pen is used in an accounting ledger at certain times of year is not obscure?

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by chrisbaker98 on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @07:55AM (#34065204)

I don't get what you're saying. It's not obscure at all that black ink denotes profits and red ink denotes losses - "in the black" and "in the red" are well-understood English phrases.

All I'm saying is that this particular meaning of black/red doesn't appear to be the origins of the name "black Friday", at least according to Wikipedia, but I really don't care about this enough to investigate any further.

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