You guys ever won­der how the names came about for the days of the week? As a lit­tle break, I took and won­dered off to out­er space and this ques­tion both­ered me for a cou­ple of min­utes. For exam­ple, the mean­ing of the first part of “Thurs­day”. That is, “thurs”. What is it? What does it mean? Here are some def­i­n­i­tions I have found from the biggest, cen­tral­ized knowl­edge-base in the world (aka. the inter­net):

• Thurs­day is the day of the week between Wednes­day and Fri­day.
• The name Thurs­day comes from the Old Eng­lish Þun­res­dæg, mean­ing the day of Þunor, com­mon­ly known in Mod­ern Eng­lish as Thor.
• Some have adopt­ed an acronym for Thurs­day, sim­i­lar to Fri­day’s T.G.I.F., to say “So Hap­py It’s Thurs­day,” or S.H.I.T.
• In the pop­u­lar rhyme, “Thurs­day’s Child has far to go”.
• In The Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy by Dou­glas Adams, the char­ac­ter Arthur Dent says “This must be Thurs­day. I could nev­er get the hang of Thurs­days”. A few min­utes lat­er the plan­et Earth is destroyed. Thor, for whom the day was named, also appears lat­er in the Hitch­hik­er’s series and in oth­er Adams books.
• In the Hin­du reli­gion, Thurs­day is guru­var or the Guru’s day.
• Quak­ers tra­di­tion­al­ly refer to Thurs­day as “Fifth Day” eschew­ing the “pagan” ori­gin of the name “Thurs­day”.

Inter­est­ing aye? Well check this out… in terms of his­to­ry, here’s one for the record books:

Black Thurs­day refers to Octo­ber 24, 1929 when stock prices in the NYSE fall sharply, with record vol­ume of near­ly 13 mil­lion shares. Five days lat­er, the mar­ket crashed on vol­ume of over 16 mil­lion shares — a lev­el not to be sur­passed for 39 years. In pop­u­lar imagery, the crash has come to mark the begin­ning of the Great Depres­sion.

“How about in terms of the Bible?”, you might ask. Well, here it is:

There are two hol­i­days that tra­di­tion­al­ly fall on Thurs­day. One is Maun­dy Thurs­day. It is the Thurs­day upon the eve of Good Fri­day. Bib­li­cal accounts have it that the “Last Sup­per” was on a Thurs­day, and it was at this meal that Christ gave the “man­date” to his dis­ci­ples to “love one anoth­er”. The word Maun­dy is a cor­rup­tion of the Latin word “man­date”.

Mean­while, here’s one Thurs­day that most peo­ple in the US look for­ward to every year:

One of the most pop­u­lar hol­i­days in the Unit­ed States is Thanks­giv­ing. It always falls on the fourth Thurs­day in Novem­ber.

Very inter­est­ing to find all of this stuff. I guess thats why peo­ple don’t like Hump-day (aka. Wednes­day) that much. But once they are over it, they feel [like] S.H.I.T. =P