Good Friday (n.): the Friday before Easter observed in churches as the anniversary of the crucifixion of Christ and in some states of the United States as a legal holiday

I’m a little late on the uptake with this, but that’s nothing new. I recently received an email from a good friend suggesting I do an April Fool’s Day post inventing a word and waxing nostalgic about its tortuous lineage, but I didn’t read it until April 2. So that went well.

Last night I was on a remarkably uncrowded F train to Manhattan around 11 PM and I thought of chalking the lack of people up to Good Friday. It’s a long shot in the godless, hedonistic Gomorrah I live in, but, well, I didn’t really care enough to hypothesize past that first idea. Anyway, this of course got me thinking about the name “Good Friday.” It’s a tragic truth that ruminating on Good Friday inevitably sounds like a bad Jerry Seinfeld parody (“Good Friday, what is up with that? Jesus gets scourged and killed? Doesn’t sound too good to me!”), but the question is a legitimate one. “Good” has a lot of senses, the most common being those praising quality or quantity (a good magazine, a good buy, a good amount). There are a select few derivatives in which “good” has an historical link to “God,” most notably the word “good-bye,” which began life as “God be with you,” but through a series of stages involving apocope and syncope, culminating in the substitution of “good” for “God,” most likely by analogy with phrases like “good day” or “good evening.”

The use of “good” in Good Friday is much less etymologically clear, though. Its closest analogue in the modern parlance is probably the sense of “good” as used in the phrase “the good book,” i.e. the Bible, but even that is subject to interpretation: is that “good” meaning worthy of respect or honorable (one’s good name); “good” meaning valid or true (a good reason); “good” meaning of moral excellence or upright (a good person); or any of the slew of other plausible senses?

The Catholics are no help. The only authoritative answer I’ve been able to find has been from the Fourth Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, which suggests that “Good Friday” is derived from an obsolete sense of “good” meaning pious or holy. The so-called “Online Etymology Dictionary” offers the following cryptic line:

c.1290, from good in sense of “holy” (e.g. the good book “the Bible,” 1896), also, esp. of holy days or seasons observed by the church (c.1420); it was also applied to Christmas and Shrove Tuesday.

The bit about the Bible casts a shadow of doubt over that whole entry, though: from what I know about English-language texts from the end of the 19th century, “good” as in holy must have been obsolete already; the other elements of that explanation are plausible, but the credibility of the source is now damaged. Online Etymology Dictionary, you’re on notice.