Today's “holiday” is pretty goofball. It's supposed to be the bicentennial birthday of a fictitious person. “The bicentennial birthday” means the 200th birthday—so we would imagine that the birthday boy or girl was born in 1813...but in this case EVERY year is the bicentennial birthday.
It's all one giant (and bad) pun – Bison-Ten-Yell, said just right, sounds a lot like “bicentennial.”
Anyway, since the birthday boy or girl is fictitious, he or she never really existed. In other words, she or he was never actually born. I guess that makes it okay for him or her to have a different birth date every year!
Now, why on earth do we celebrate the bicentennial birthday of a person who never existed? Today is supposed to honor the person who invented ten verbal signals that could be yelled during a war to alert one's soldiers to the battle plan. Ten signals, yelled signals—these are the reasons given for the “Ten-Yell” part of the name. Let's just hope the battles weren't fought against bison! They're really big and scary!
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