When I was in primary school in the early/mid 1960s, a lot of the arithmatic we did was currency calculations. And the times tables we learnt went up to 12, which was very useful for counting money then; not sure if they go beyond the 10 times table these days…
And, going back a few posts, 7 items at 3/9d is fairly easy, even all these years on.
7 x 4/- = 28/-
7 x 3d = 1/9d
take 1/9d from 28/-
= 26/3d or £1:6/3d
Most people I knew when I had grown up a bit wouldn’t have had too much trouble doing sums like that while out shopping.
(the 'd’s were often dropped from the notation as everybody understood the system)
This is probably not the place to cite this Youtube video of Tom Lehrer explaining decimalization to a British audience in a deliberately confusing way. Voilà: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIpr0s52yVk
I don’t think the average person would be inclined to riot with pitchforks and torches if the dollar bill were discontinued. They would probably just grumble for a while and move on, as has happened everywhere else in the same circumstance. The biggest single reason it hasn’t been done up until now was the late Ted Kennedy, in whose state the factory that manufactures the paper stock for our currency is located. Clearly the work for this factory would be slashed to a fraction of what it is currently, since that’s all they do, IIRC.
Not that one Senator, even a very senior one, should normally be able to stop such a move, but I suspect that the subject of the dollar bill became a sort of political football (“I’ll vote for your bill if you agree to strike the provision removing the dollar bill from the dollar coin legislation”, etc.)
111 posts and am I really the first to recall the “maggie”? a name adopted in the eighties and nineties, for the then new “gold-coloured” one-pound coin, because, ‘it’s brassy, two-faced and worthless but thinks it’s a sovereign’
Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, had a nauseating tendency to apply some of the more regal characteristics of Her Majesty ( “we are a grandmother!” she anounced following her daughter Carol giving birth)
Incidently, I work with Americans who rotate regularly back to the US and I have been asking them to bring me some $2 bills for some time now. one will not do it because he does not think they exist the other just has apoor memory. So if any one wishes to post me some I can in return post back either Philippine Peso, European Euro, Turkish New Lira, Azeri New Manat, English Pounds, Scottish Pounds or Emirates Dirhams
I’m the local anglophile (QI, Top Gear, Kingdom, Have I Got News for You, Jonathan Creek…) but no one has mentioned in this thread what LSD is, and even I don’t know it. Hints?
LSD, which should properly be written £sd, is a shorthand for “pounds, shillings, and [old\ pence”, playing off the shorthand for lysergic acid diethylamide. In other words, prior to decimalization, monetary amounts might be written £52 6/8 – meaning 52 pounds six shillings eightpence – very close to decimal £52.33 as it happens.
There are 2 different dollar coins in America that are official currency.
The Susan B. Anthony dollar was introduced in the 70s, and suffered greatly as the public was mostly unable to distinguish between this and the common quarter. Both were very similarly sized and colored, and both had ridged edges.
The more recent golden George Washington dollar coin somehow never took off. I think I last got one a few years ago in change from a post office stamp machine.
Ha! Remember buying stamps to send actual letters! I haven’t sent a postal letter in a few months. I probably use 5 a year. They have to use a different method of distribution. Maybe the mint will have to cut off all paper singles entirely.
Wendell is of course correct. I screwed up in revising my post, which was originally suggesting, in part, that the abbreviation gained popularity as a punning reference. On rereading it, it seems that that suggestion was kist before I submitted the post.
To be exact it comes from the Roman coins “librae, solidi, denarii”. The £ is an ornate letter L, and it’s perfectly acceptable to write LSD, you don’t have to write it as £sd.
The more I think about this, the odder it seems. Were the Roman coins ever used at the same time as pounds, shillings and pence? Did their names hang on as generic terms for coins after the Romans left Britain? How did the names come to be used as English abbreviations?
The term “denarius” was used in formal documents (in Latin) for the Anglo-Saxon sceats which were the origin of the silver penny. I am unclear on whether Latin libra first meant a weight or the scales used to weigh it, but it early came to represent a measure of weight that in England came to represent one pound. The money value “pound” came from the fact that 240 silver denarii taken togethr weighed one pound Troy weight, hence “one pound [of] sterling [silver].” TTBOMK, the shilling came from the Danelaw, where it had the Nordic name skilling, and was equated with the Roman measure solidus, as one element in the medieval writers’ efforts to find Latin terms with which to refer to Germanic institutions. (For example, the eorlesmoot (And I may be off on the Anglo-Saxon there) was the local eorl meeting with the chief landholders of his county. After the Danish and Norman invasions, and scribes rendering the overlay of institutions into Latin, this gave rise to the concilium comitiae, which in turn became the modern “county council.”) The skilling was, however, money of account until Elizabethan-Jacobean times, when a coin in that denomination was finally struck.
