Who, What, Why: Why is Good Friday called Good Friday?
It is the day when Christians commemorate Jesus Christ's crucifixion. So why is it called Good Friday?
According to the Bible, the son of God was flogged, ordered to carry the cross on which he would be crucified and then put to death. It's difficult to see what is "good" about it.
Some sources suggest that the day is "good" in that it is holy, or that the phrase is a corruption of "God's Friday".
However, according to Fiona MacPherson, senior editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective traditionally "designates a day on (or sometimes a season in) which religious observance is held". The OED states that "good" in this context refers to "a day or season observed as holy by the church", hence the greeting "good tide" at Christmas or on Shrove Tuesday. In addition to Good Friday, there is also a less well-known Good Wednesday, namely the Wednesday before Easter.
The earliest known use of "guode friday" is found in The South English Legendary, a text from around 1290, according to the dictionary.According to the Baltimore Catechism - the standard US Catholic school text from 1885 to the 1960s, Good Friday is good because Christ "showed His great love for man, and purchased for him every blessing".
The Catholic Encyclopedia, first published in 1907, states that the term's origins are not clear. It says some sources see its origins in the term "God's Friday" or Gottes Freitag,while others maintain that it is from the German Gute Freitag. It notes that the day was called Long Friday by the Anglo-Saxons and is referred to as such in modern Danish.
It also says that the day is known as "the Holy and Great Friday" in the Greek liturgy, "Holy Friday" in Romance Languages andKarfreitag (Sorrowful Friday) in German.
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21 April 2014 Last updated at 00:57
Small Data: Does the UK have enough bank holidays?
As you enjoy another bank holiday, are you thinking "why don't we have more of them", asks Anthony Reuben.
The UK has only eight bank holidays - is that enough?
Before we begin thinking about this, a word for the pedants (and there's nothing wrong with a bit of pedantry). In the UK, Easter Monday is a bank holiday (except in Scotland, where banks are closed but not all areas observe the holiday). Good Friday is a common law holiday by convention or a public holiday, except in Scotland, where it's a bank holiday.
Most people use the terms bank holiday and public holiday interchangeably, so I plan to do so as well.
The point is, in Japan they have loads more bank holidays than the UK does - twice as many - from Greenery Day in May to Respect for the Aged Day in September.
Places like Spain, South Korea and South Africa also have more public holidays than the UK does. There have been many attempts to calculate the cost of a bank holiday, which the Magazine reported on a couple of years ago. Figures have been bandied about including £2.3bn per holiday and a range from a gain of £1.1bn to a loss of £3.6bn.
The huge range of these estimates is because it's very hard to tell. It's easy to say how losses would be made by a car factory working three shifts a day and producing its maximum output. But in the UK's predominantly service-led economy, that is less of an issue. Indeed, a bank holiday may allow additional opportunities for companies to appeal to consumers.
When you look at current statistics on the economy, the thing worrying economists is not whether people are working enough hours, it's whether they are being productive enough in the hours they are working. There were estimates in 2012 that UK workers were producing a fifth less per hour than the average across the G7 group of industrialised countries. Maybe having a few extra days off would help the UK be more productive.
Unfortunately, the only member of the G7 group less productive than the UK has been Japan, which, as I mentioned, has many more public holidays than the UK does.
So we're back to square one.
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