Posts Tagged ‘origins’
Question Asked: When Did Barnes & Noble Originally Open?
According to the research I’ve done, this is sort of a two part answer.
Charles Barnes opened a book printing business way back in 1873, in Wheaton Illinois. Some say this was the origins of what we know today as Barnes & Noble.
It wasn’t until 44 years later that the first “bookstore” opened. Barnes’ son, William, partnered with G. Clifford Noble and opened a bookstore at 31 West 15th Street, in New York City.
During the Great Depression, it was moved to 18th Street and Fifth Avenue. This store is still open, and is their flagship store.
In 1971, the business was sold. Leonard Riggio purchased it from the family he’d worked for, for a number of years.
In 1987, Barnes & Noble purchased B. Dalton Bookseller stores, from Dayton Hudson, expanding their stores to nationwide, and increasing them by 797.
Leonard Riggio’s brother Stephen is currently the CEO of Barnes & Noble.
The company currently has 798 stores acrosst he United States. 85 are B. Dalton Booksellers (located mostly in malls.) Since Barnes & Noble bought out B. Dalton, they’ve closed 882 of their stores, and plan on continuing to phase them out.
Question Asked: Where Did The Handshake Originate?
Yet another much debated topic for today’s question.
One theory is that the handshake originated in medieval times with the ettiguette of knights.
Another is that it originated with British nobles.
Yet another is that originated with Romans who clasped each other’s forearms to ensure his opponent wasn’t carrying a concealed weapon.
What all of these theories agree upon, however, is that the handshake predates written history, and it is thus impossible to “verify” its origins.
The earliest records of handshakes are in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Question Asked: Who Came Up With The Term “President?”
In researching this answer over the last few hours, it’s pretty evident that we really don’t know who first coined the leader of the United States as the “President.”
We do find, from Clinton Rossiter’s “The Grand Convention” (chapter 11):
We do not know the name of the individual who first proposed this title.
Early drafts of the Constitution referred simply to the “Executive” at first leaving open even whether it should be one man or several, though the latter notion was soon dropped.
The word “President” first appears in the report of the Committee of Detail, submitted to the full Convention on August 6, 1787. This committee consisted of John Rutledge (SC), Edmund Randolph (Va), James Wilson (Pa), Oliver Ellsworth (Conn) and Nathaniel Gorham (Mass).
The terms Speaker, Congress, Senate, House of Representatives, and Supreme Court also appear for the first time in this report, along with expressions like “We, the People”, “State of the Union”, “privileges and immunities”, “necessary and proper”, and reference to “vacancies” in House or Senate, “disability” in the Presidency, and “extraordinary occasions” on which Congress might be assembled. So this group of relatively obscure men made a big impact, semantically at least, on the future of the United States, coining many expressions in everyday use to the present time.
The word president originates from the Latin praesident-, praesidens, based on the present participle of praesidEre. Thus, a president is an official who presides over a body of people. That body could be a club or it could be a nation. The president occupies the role of authority over the body.
Question Asked: Where Does The Word Anniversary Come From?
The word “anniversary” comes from the Latin anniversarius, from the words for year and to turn, meaning returning yearly.
We’ve been using the word we derived from anniversarius (anniversary) since about 1230AD, starting in England.
There’s very little information about who started using it in the way that we do today or when that happened, available on the internet. (At least the places I’ve looked anyway.)
Until contested, we’ll stick with the above information.
Question Asked: Why Do They Call It Black Friday?
The term Black Friday was first used to describe Sept. 24, 1869, when several financiers had tried to corner the gold market and the market crashed, and a depression ensued. Another panic in the financial markets in 1873 also began on a Friday.
The Great Depression was precipitated by the Oct. 29, 1929 start of the stock market collapse. But that was Black Tuesday. Another bad day for the stock market—Oct. 19, 1987—was called Black Monday.
Nowdays the term Black Friday is used to refer to the day after Thanksgiving, where many retailers have huge discounted sales, and open at the crack of dawn. The “black” part of the name, while not actually confirmed by the people who came up with the name, is supposedly describing going from “red to black” on their balance sheets.
In laymen’s terms, it’s when retailers start making a profit. And you’re helping by being out there (right now) spending your hard earned cash.