There’s an interesting shift in Brazil where the word “Friday”, in English, might get another meaning. Surprising no one (I hope), most Brazilians don’t speak English, so they don’t know what “Black Friday” really means. Some might be aware that “black” means “dark” or the literal color black but have no idea that “Friday”, a less common English word to see in day-to-day life, is a weekday.

So, for most of the population, Black Friday is just the name of a deep discount event on retail at the end of November.

Now here’s the interesting part: many people kinda treat “Friday” as meaning “a deep discount”, which in turn means the word is used in the wrong context every now and then, leading to funny things like “Terça Friday” (“Tuesday Friday”, literally meaning there’s a deep discount on Tuesday) or “Week Friday” (a deep discount the whole week), two of the most popular memes, based on real-world photos, that get shared around this time of the year.

This is just a random thing, I’m not sure if it can be classified as a linguistic shift, but I wonder if there are more cases like this happening, or how entrenched this understanding of “Friday” is among the general population.