A simple question, but I can’t find the answer by googling.
I’m reading the Suzumiya Haruhi novels, and the narrator, Kyon, someyimes refers to his friends Taniguchi and Kunikida as “two-bit characters”. What does this mean? The only use of “two-bit” I can find online, is to describe an object as cheap.
Exactly. Two bits is slang for a quarter. Describing something cheap as two-bit goes back probably to the 1920s, when you would see references to things like “two-bit hoodlum” to describe a low-level thug in a detective novel. No idea how it is being used in what you are reading, but it’s kind of a film-noir type reference.
Well since the OP is answered, how did ‘two bits’ become slang for a quarter? Two-bit would seem to imply that there is also a single bit, but I don’t see how useful it is to have a term for 12 1/2 cents.
Here’s my guess:
In colonial days, Americas used any currency that was available since they didn’t mint their own coins. A popular one was the Spanish dollar, worth eight reales. This was the piece of eight known from pirate movies.
Americans combined this with an old British expression for small coins and called each eighth a bit. I don’t know for sure if they literally cut the coins into eighths or just used the expression figuratively, but one-bit, two-bit, etc. entered the language both literally as fractions of a dollar and figuratively as anything cheap, or small, or not whole, or not worth paying good money for. Small change also came to take on most of those meanings.
A two-bit hood in private eye books was a punk, a poor imitation of someone really dangerous, a quarter as opposed to real folding money. Today we might use knockoff in that way, a cheap imitation of a luxury good. Both phrases are extremely versatile and can be extended to a wide variety of figurative sues.
They literally cut the coin into bits sometimes. It was solid silver, so that was a way to make change.
I also understand it to be the going rate for a shave and a haircut.
Your barber must have been one desperate dude. Most barbers traditionally charged six bits!
(Wikipedia says both. That’s news to me. I’ve never heard other than “six bits”. 
Including the shave, of course.)
ETA: Anyone remember what it was in Roger Rabbit? – Two bits or six bits?
Don’t know about Roger Rabbit, but I’ve only heard the “two bits” version.
ETA: Two bits in Roger Rabbit.
I assume inflation drove the price of a shave and a haircut from 2 bits to 6 bits over time. At that point the phrase stuck instead of following through to the current price of 232 bits.
It has to be six bits or the second verse doesn’t make sense. You know – the one that starts “Cow and a milkmaid”
Yeah. 232 bits wouldn’t scan.
Anyone remember the old football cheer?
Two bits!
Four bits!
Six bits!
A dollar!
All for (your school)
Stand up and holler!
Note also that Spanish coinage continued to circulate on par with the US dollar through a large part of the 19th century, particularly in the west, reinforcing the “two bits = a quarter” equivalence.
The Coinage Act of 1857 made foreign coins no longer legal tender. However, when the twenty cent silver coin was minted in 1875/76, Spanish bits were still being circulated in the west.
Googling “Cow and a milkmaid” six bits brings up nothing. So I don’t get it.
I’m guessing something to do with the total number of teats.
They rarely would do this. The idea that the Spanish dollar sized 8 real was cut into pieces is a bit of a fantasy. Not saying it didn’t happen, but rarely done.
It makes me wonder if 128-bit encryption is really only worth 16 dollars.
nm
On a more serious note, I wonder if this is where the 8 bits to a byte thing came from?
This is from a site about Australian colonial currency, which also used the Spanish dollar. It makes for a good read, but as to the cutting - it seems that it happened enough to be documented as real, but not all that often:
http://www.australianstamp.com/Coin-web/aust/earlyaus.htm#CutDollarsAnchor