Black Friday (shopping) corner the gold market. When President Grant learned of this manipulation, he ordered the Treasury to release a large supply of gold, which halted the run and caused prices to drop by eighteen percent. Fortunes were made and lost in a single day, and the president's own brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, was ruined. The earliest known use of "Black Friday" to refer to the day after Thanksgiving occurs in the journal, "Factory Management and Maintenance", for November 1951, and again in 1952. Here it referred to the practice of workers calling in sick on the day after Thanksgiving, in order to
Friday the 13th strengthen the superstition about Tuesday. In addition, in Greek the name of the day is Triti ("Τρίτη") meaning the third (day of the week), adding weight to the superstition, since bad luck is said to "come in threes". Tuesday the 13th occurs in a month that begins on a Thursday. In Italian popular culture, Friday the 17th (and not the 13th) is considered a day of bad luck. The origin of this belief could be traced in the writing of number 17, in Roman numerals: XVII. By shuffling the digits of the number one can easily get the word VIXI