A Funny Thing Happened on Veterans Day

Armistice Day commemorates the end of hostilities on The Western Front of World War One. It went into effect at eleven o'clock in the morning: "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918. Armistice Day became Veterans Day after World War Two. I've always felt the day's solemn weight, and I try to thank any Veterans I meet on their day. My father and uncle both served in WW2, Dad was a Navy SeaBee in the Aleutian Islands, Uncle George survived the Battle of the Bulge.

In the font-driven world of Social Media on the internet, this year Veterans Day gets special attention because it looks so good: 11|11|11

Thousands, if not millions of snarky geeks have been riffing on the date all day. Lost in the avalanche of tweets, Facebook status updates, and blog posts is the name of the first wag to see corduroy in the elevens lined up... voilà, Corduroy Day! or Corduroy Appreciation Day. Someone's thinking Big too: National Corduroy Day and International Corduroy Day!

I'm amazed that the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The New Yorker all had print on the fabric's big day.

I'm not surprised that Twitter was the launching pad for so much snarky fun.The Twitter hashtag  #Corduroy went viral, sucked me in (duh!) and then I searched Corduroy People. There's an awful lot of us on Twitter!

Who knew there was a @CorduroyClub?

Corduroy food? @badfeather asked: "Has ramen been proposed as a potential #corduroy food? Dried as rumpled, wet as deconstructed?"

See what I mean?

It's all great fun for CorduroyNation I suppose, though it is bad form to have so much goofy fun on an otherwise solemn holiday...and holiday doesn't set right for me either.

Oh, I understand that "Holiday" morphed from "Holy Day"...but I feel the pangs of guilt when I'm doin' a spit take while reading some snarkmeister's fractured funny business on such a weighty day.