April Fools' Day

April Fools' Day is celebrated in different countries around the world on the April 1 of every year. Sometimes referred to as All Fools' Day, April 1 is not a national holiday, but is widely recognized and celebrated as a day when many people play all kinds of jokes and foolishness. The day is marked by the commission of good humoured or funny jokes, hoaxes, and other practical jokes of varying sophistication on friends, family members, teachers, neighbors, work associates, etc.

The earliest recorded association between April 1 and foolishness can be found in Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales (1392). Many writers suggest that the restoration of January 1 as New Year's Day in the 16th century was responsible for the creation of the holiday, but this theory does not explain earlier references.

Origins

In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1392), the "Nun's Priest's Tale" is set Syn March bigan thritty dayes and two.^[1] Modern scholars believe that there is a copying error in the extant manuscripts and that Chaucer actually wrote, Syn March was gon.^[2] Thus the passage originally meant 32 days after March, i.e. May 2,^[3] the anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England toAnne of Bohemia, which took place in 1381. However, readers apparently misunderstood this line to mean "32nd of March," i.e. 1st April.^[4] In Chaucer's tale, the vain cock Chauntecleer is tricked by a fox.

In 1509, a French poet referred to a poisson d’avril (April fool, literally "April fish"), a possible reference to the holiday.^[3] In 1539, Flemish poet Eduard de Dene wrote of a nobleman who sent his servants on foolish errands on the 1st of April.^[3] In 1686, John Aubrey referred to the holiday as "Fooles holy day", the first British reference.^[3] On 1st April, 1698, several people were tricked into going to the Tower of London to "see the Lions washed".^[3] The name "April Fools" echoes that of the Feast of Fools, a Medieval holiday held on the 28th December.^[5]

In the Middle Ages, New Year's Day was celebrated on the 25th of March in most European towns.^[6] In some areas of France, New Year's was a week-long holiday ending on the 1st of April.^[5] So it is possible that April Fools originated because those who celebrated on the 1st of January made fun of those who celebrated on other dates.^[7] The use of the 1st of January as New Year's Day was common in France by the mid-sixteenth century,^[3] and this date was adopted officially in 1564 by the Edict of Roussillon.

Real news on April Fools' Day

The frequency of April Fools' hoaxes sometimes makes people doubt real news stories released on April 1.

The 1946 April Fools' Day tsunami in Hilo, Hawaii.

• The April 1, 1946 Aleutian Island earthquake tsunami that killed 165 people in Hawaii and Alaska resulted in the creation of a tsunami warning system, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, established in 1949 for Pacific Ocean countries. The tsunami in question is known in Hawaii as the "April Fools' Day Tsunami" due to people drowning because of the assumptions that the warnings were an April Fools' prank.
• The death of King George II of Greece was on April 1, 1947.
• The AMC Gremlin was first introduced on April 1, 1970.^[77]
• In 1979, Iran declared April 1 its national Republic Day. Thirty-two years on, this continues to be mistaken for a joke.^[78]
• On April 1, 1984, singer Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father. Originally, people assumed that it was a fake news story, especially considering the bizarre aspect of the father being the murderer.
• On April 1, 1991, news emerged that David Icke, the British sports reporter, had announced that he was the son of God and that the world was about to end in an apocalypse. Not surprisingly, many people took the reports as an April Fool. Icke has, however, continued to expound his views.
• On April 1, 1993, NASCAR Winston Cup Series Champion Alan Kulwicki was killed in a plane crash involving Hooters of Americaexecutives in Blountville, Tennessee near the Tri-Cities Airport. The party were travelling to the Food City 500 qualifying scheduled for the next day.
• The suicide death of Deathrock legend Rozz Williams was on April 1, 1998.
• On April 1, 1999, the Canadian Northwest Territories was split, and the territory now known as Nunavut came to be.
• Gmail's April 1, 2004 launch was widely believed to be a prank, as Google traditionally perpetrates April Fools' Day hoaxes each April 1, and the announced 1GB online storage was at the time vastly more than existing online email services (see Google's hoaxes.) Another Google-related event that turned out not to be a hoax occurred on April 1, 2007, when employees at Google's New York City office were alerted that a ball python kept in an engineer's cubicle had escaped and was on the loose. An internal e-mail acknowledged that "the timing…could not be more awkward" but that the snake's escape was in fact an actual occurrence and not a prank.^[79]
• On April 1, 2008, it was reported that UEFA would require the Swedish fast food chain Max to close their restaurant at the Borås Arenaduring the European Under-21 Football Championship due to a conflict with official sponsor McDonald's and a requirement that only official sponsors may operate around the arena. The arena was later replaced as a tournament site.^[80]
• On April 1, 2008, Persch announced that the GNOME desktop web browser Epiphany would be switched from Mozilla's Gecko engine to the WebKit engine used by Safari and KDE's equivalent application Konqueror.^[81]
• Also, on April 1, 2009, a Virus/Worm called Conficker was released in December 2008 but reports about its spread to millions of computers, releasing personal info and deleting files came out on April 1st. This was supposed to be a joke, but random computers throughout America were hit. Before this happened, news media like NBC, Fox News, ABC and CBS told the viewers to install firewallsand updates to their Windows computers before it hit.^{[citation needed]}
• On April 1, 2011, word of Betty White to host a prank show called Betty White's Off Their Rockers hit the news.^[82