The Liberty Head nickel had no denomination at all, just a Roman numeral V on the reverse. When they were new, some enterprising grifter gold plated some and passed them off as a new half-eagle.
I was there in August 2003 actually… it got to 101.3 F in Kent, and IIRC in Oxford where I was, it got to about 97 or so.
It was fucking miserable. People were saying stuff like “Remind you of home?” because I’m from Texas. And I’d reply “No! We’re not savages, we have air conditioning!”
I was actually talking about it being a nice summer day in the Midwest (which it isn’t; it’s a lot hotter than that in many places), and pointing out that it’s more of a late spring temperature here.
I spent the summer of 1976 hitchhiking around England. That was the year of the worst drought in three centuries, and the temperature hovered around 90 F on most days.
I was in cutoffs and short sleeves most of the time, so it didn’t really bother me. There was none of the near triple-digit humidity you get in large parts of the US during summer.
I spent April though May in Scotland, where it rained every rotten day. I’d look out the window and think “How can there be a drought in Britain?” Then I went south in June and BAM the grass turned brown the other side of Newcastle. I also got way too much sun on the Isle of Man and spent the next two weeks peeling badly.
Things changed drastically the second weekend in September, with a huge storm coming in out of the Atlantic. I was at Land’s End, and damned near froze to death hitchhiking back to Brechin to retrieve my cold-weather gear.
I also went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival that trip. One of the performances was in an attic. I almost passed out from the heat. Definitely not a drop of rain anywhere that I ever saw.
I’m looking at a “dime” minted in 2014 right now. On the reverse (i.e., “tails”) side, it reads: “One Dime” It does not actually state the value of the coin anywhere on either side. I remember helping some befuddled Brits try to feed a parking meter once.
A dime is a unit a money equal to one tenth of a dollar, just like the cent is one hundredth and a mil is one thousandth.
Yes but it’s interesting (and probably annoying to foreigners) that our four commonly used coins use three different monetary units to express their value. A penny is inscribed “One Cent”, a nickel says “Five Cents”, a dime says “One Dime” and a quarter says “Quarter Dollar”. Why couldn’t the last two say “Ten Cents” and “25 Cents”?
The original nickel was called a half-disme, or half a dime. (Disme is from the French and the “s” is silent as is isle.)
Was there a time when the British penny was nearly the same value as the American cent? Like, if the exchange rate was $2.40 -> £1 (before decimalization, of course).
The whole design of the US currency is an interesting combination of what I’d call metric thinking vs imperial (as in measurement) thinking.
In Imperial systems, you have large units being any-old multiple of the small units (twelve, twenty, three … or whatever) so you’re very reluctant to drop down to the next smallest unit. It’s much easier if you’re, say, measuring distances, to talk about half miles and quarter miles than try to remember how many yards that is - recipes have quarter cups and third cups rather than translate to tablespoons. People who are fully metricated do this a lot less - nobody talks about half centimeters or quarter litres, it’s 5 mils or two fifty mils (yeah, same colloquial term for both)
So the US monetary system is an interesting hybrid. It’s based on a lovely regular decimal system, just like the French had been pioneering. But they were clearly still thinking in an Imperial kind of way - a quarter is a quarter because it’s fundamental identity is ‘a quarter of the next biggest unit’ - it only accidentally happens to be equal to 25 cents. If the designers had been thinking of it as ‘a number of cents added together’ they probably would have made it 20, not 25
Green has frequently been used as the colour for UK banknotes. When the original radio series was broadcast, the green Pound Note was in circulation in the UK. First episode broadcast 8th March 1978, about the same time that this designwas changed to this one. Since the abolition of the pound note, the £5 note has been green or blue/green.
I very much doubt that DA was thinking of American currency. Metaphors that use green for money are well understood over here.
“Daler” were the main coin in the Dano-Norwegian kingdom from 1544 until the Scandinavian countries went metric and started using “kroner” in the late nineteenth century. So in this specific quote Shakespear could have been referring to Norwegian coins. (Although he probably didn’t.)
Shakespeare uses the word in The Tempest, too:
Wall Street only went to “decimal points” sometime since when I worked in finance. Before that, when stock moved by 1 point, it was 12.5c. 1 bit. 1 bit of a piece-of-8. One bit of a Spanish Dollar.
A quarter of a dollar is, in the old American expression, 2 bits. As in “For 2 bits I’d…”
Aha! An opportunity to talk about the history of European coinage! You’d be amazed how infrequently this comes up in conversation.
To expand on Nava’s post, thaler is a term for a type of large silver coin minted in Central Europe, starting in the 1530s. The first came from silver mines near the Czech town then called “Joachimthal” (now Jachymov). The coins were called Joachimthalers, and were popular enough that other principalities began minting similar coins and calling them thalers.
Eventually this spread to the Low Countries, who struck a few types of what they called daalders. One of them was the phillippus daalder so named after the then-ruler of the Netherlands, Phillip II of Spain. Daalder entered Spanish as dolaro, and was applied to the silver eight-reales coins they struck at their mine in San Luis Potosi, in Bolivia. This coin had wide circulation throughout all the colonies of the Americas, including the English ones; at the time of the American Revolution, Spanish dollars were by far the most common coin in what became the U.S., which is why Thomas Jefferson proposed adopting them as the new nation’s currency, rather than the very scarce pounds, shillings, and pence of the U.K.
See, I knew all the times I reread Porteous’ Coins In History would pay off; I’ve never had the opportunity to make an entire message board’s eyes glaze over at the same time
The Spanish dollars/pieces of eight that circulated in the British coloniescould and were cut up for small change – which was rare and desperately needed in the Colonies – thus “pieces of eight”, and “two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar”. My WAG is that the American quarter is a linguistic fossil from a monetary unit that was quite literally a physical quarter of a larger coin.
Speaking of old coins, behold the Maria Theresa thaler, in circulation yet today, nearly 140 years after the old gal’s passing.
Probably. But it was also a term already in use in Britain and so one easy to move over.
The word “thal” means - and is cognate with - the English “valley”, or vale, so when we get out or wallets, we are pretty much spending vallers.
Yes, Joachimsthal is the “valley of St. Joachim”, just as Neanderthals were first discovered in the valley of the Neander.
Didn’t know thal was cognate with valley, though. Makes sense.