You’ve arrived at the carnival and you know you’re going to have a blast!
Check out the brightly colored posters hanging up everywhere, arrows pointing you in the right direction. Step closer, you’ll hear the music and your heart will skip a beat. Then you step into the fray and everyone’s playing games, eating cotton candy, smiling, laughing, having a great time. You’ve arrived at the carnival and you know you’re going to have a blast!
It’s a carnival — not a fair… but what’s the difference? Carnivals began as a yearly tradition dating back hundreds of years, from the times when people celebrated seasonal changes or holidays.
They’re all about fun, with rides, games and food. Fairs are usually theme-based events that are supposed to promote something (like your state in the state fair, or an art exhibit) — although they’ll also often have the fun stuff you usually associate with carnivals, too. After all, they want people to have fun (not to mention spend lots of money)!
“Carny” is a slang term in North America for a person who is employed by a carnival. (In Australia, the word is “showie.”) But that’s not all. There’s an ever-changing secret language that carnies use so that they can talk among themselves without people understanding what they’re saying. As people figure out their secret language, those words lose their function and more words are made up instead!
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