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If you write the name of the occasion incorrectly, you might receive your fair share of ribbing. Do yourself a favor and mind your apostrophe. The official name of this holiday is April Fools’ Day. Fools is plural, so the apostrophe for possession appears after the last S. However, according to a search on Google Ngram Viewer, the singular variant is actually the most popular one. Some dictionaries acknowledge the variant, April Fool’s day. Different Strokes for Different FolksNot everyone observes April Fools’ Day in the same way. In the Western world, many pranks focus on tricking someone into believing something extraordinary. In 1998, Burger King advertised a new menu item in USA Today. The full-page ad introduced the Left-Handed Whopper. Burger King claimed that they designed the new sandwich by rotating the ingredients of the regular Whopper 180 degrees to accommodate lefties. The prank duped thousands of left- and right-handers who began ordering the sandwich corresponding to their dominant hand. Other jokes are designed to cause mild trouble for the victim. For instance, Reader’s Digest published a list of seven practical jokes to play on coworkers who are lax about logging out of their Facebook accounts. The article included changing the colleague’s display language to one that doesn’t use the Roman alphabet (e.g., Japanese or Arabic) and accepting friend requests from strangers. Tricks like these provide a laugh as well as a life lesson. France is particularly unique in the way they mark April 1. In French, the day is called Poisson d’Avril, or April Fish! Children spend the day trying to sneak a picture of a fish onto the back of their schoolmates. If the friend finds it, they yell, “Poisson d’Avril” in place of the “April Fool!” cry of people in the English-speaking world. Another common ploy is to send someone on a “fool’s errand.” In other words, you ask him to search for an item that doesn’t exist or otherwise waste time trying to complete a useless task. |
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