29 October—29 October was a Tuesday in 1929 and is remembered as Black Tuesday because on that day prices on the New York Stock Exchange tumbled. It followed Black Monday (28 October, to save you the trouble of working it out through calendar calculus), when prices had plummeted, and Black Thursday, 24 October, when prices had plunged.

If you’re wondering about the Friday between Black Thursday and Black Monday, its date was 25 October and it continues the melanic sequence as Black Friday—even though the NYSE actually enjoyed a rally, however moderate and brief, thanks in part to President Herbert Hoover’s reassurance that the country was on a “sound and prosperous basis.”

You’d figure it would have been more appropriate to call the days of market decline and negative numbers red days rather than black. But in English linguistic tradition (and Western tradition in general, dating back at least to Ancient Rome), the color black has negative association—tragedy, catastrophe, and the like, but never skin pigmentation.

And in the 1920s, moreover, with the rise of communism in the Soviet Union, the color red—from the red flag (with gold hammer and sickle; and red star with wide gold border)—had distinctly non-capitalist association.

Ignore the fact that the Soviet government, having established trade relations with the Brits, bought three Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts in 1922 for use by Vladimir Lenin and other VIPs. After all, why shouldn’t a dictator have a fancy car?

And lest you wonder, while most of the world suffered from the capitalist financial collapse in the 1930s known as the Great Depression, the communist Soviet Union didn’t suffer and in fact saw massive industrial and economic growth—along with humanitarian catastrophe driven by forced collectivization, labor camps, political purges, and man-made famine . . .