Approximately 3 weeks ago I found an 1875 Indian head penny in my change; it’s in fair condition so only worth $16 according to my research. But probably, in reality, if I took it to a coin dealer he’d probably offer me like six bucks and tell me to go suck a bag of dicks if I wanted anything more than that. Not to disparage the numismatic profession, but that’s been my experience :
About 8 years ago I bought some gold from a dealer - this was when I thought the economy was crashing and I was listening to took much Peter Schiff. Anyway, I bought a Keugerrand and it was like $1100, then I sold it back to the same guy around 2 weeks later and got way less than spot; I lost like $200. Never use any of the AM radio type stuff you hear to make financial decisions- that was my take away from this whole event.
That’s when I started looking more closely at my change . . .
That right there, that’s the sauce. I didn’t mention specifics so as not to poison the opinion well, but that right there is what gives them the cheap look. At first I thought they were saving money by using the same die for a longer period of time, but then I saw that all the pennies were low relief so I thought there was something else in play. I compared the new to older pennies; the difference seems drastic to me. They should just end the penny now. It’s like when your dog is dying of cancer or some dog wasting disease and you prolong its life and then this once noble creature is reduced to a cowering pathetic shell of its former self. Just let it die with some dignity.
By “suck a bag of dicks” do you mean sucking on the bag (I picture a cloth bag of some sort) which contains dicks (amputated?!), or do you mean sucking on a number of individual dicks one at a time, putting each back into the bag when you finish with it?
Oddly enough, Louis Ck tried to parse the meaning of this phrase, but IIRC he didn’t come to any meaningful conclusions. I don’t know, I’m from Philadelphia - we just accept a lot of things without questioning them too deeply. For example, why is everything called “Jawn”, makes no sense. I tell people I’m from Philly and they ask me, “hey, why do they say “Jawn” all the time like ''this jawn” “that jawn” “her jawn” his jawn". I don’t know - in fact I never even thought much about it until I left Philadelphia. I have no idea why we say “werter” instead of “water” either. Once someone in London asked me why they named a city after cream cheese - but I think he was being facetious and that’s neither here nor there.
I left the area in 1978 so the first time I heard ‘jawn’ I was baffled. Seems to be a synonym for ‘thing’.
The ‘bag of dicks’ jawn sounds meaningful, but yeah, it makes no sense if you parse it. I don’t want someone to suck dicks that have been removed from their owners, I want them to suck real dicks. I guess the quantity ‘bag of’ can apply to anything now, not just things that could be reasonably put into a bag. Language is just weird, it’s like people just made up the words and their meanings.
It’s basically a synonym for “thing” as someone mentioned earlier. I’d say it has a little more restricted usage than the word thing; most often I hear it used as a modifier for another noun. So, if you had a sentence such as “The thing to remember about crossing the street is to make sure your pants are on.”- in that sentence it would not really make sense to replace the word “thing” with “jawn”.
In an example such as the sentence “I think this S-shaped thing on my bicycle needs to be replaced” the word jawn would be an appropriate replacement, in fact the whole would sound like this “yo, I need a new s-jawn.”
A dime, at least, is still somewhat defensible as a denomination, not least because, due to its earlier history as a silver coin, it is smaller than a penny while being worth ten times as much. I know, ten times nothing is still nothing, but if you imagine the price of a modest everyday transaction as a line drawn on paper, you can often still visualize the value of a dime as a portion of that. With a penny that would be next to impossible.
I’m very disappointed we continue to have pennies. You remember how in Pratchett’s Making Money, the mint operated at a loss and this was this big funny joke? Yeah, about that… Ditch the nickel and dime too. When’s the last time you paid a dime for something?
All US coins are of both poor design and poor manufacture. While we should fix the banknotes first, the coins also need attention. The government ought to have a design contest.
Japan sort of did that, they only use bills for anything 1000 Yen (~ $10) and greater. but they (like us) still were minting 1 Yen coins up until last year.
