pre-decimal, the basic unit of currency was the penny. Twelve pennies made a shilling and twenty shillings made a pound. Simple enough.
What they did was to introduce new coins that were the same as the old ones, but had a different design on the tails side. An old shilling coin was the same as a new 5p coin. An old 2 shilling coin was the same as a new 10p coin. They were both in circulation and interchangeable.
Penny coins were replaced by a new design. 3p coins were abolished.
Half shilling coins, six old pennies were worth two and a half new pence. But you hardly ever saw them. I think I only ever had a sixpence about twice in my life.
15 Feb 1971. Because it makes the maths easier.
12 pennies to a shilling, four farthings to a penny. So half a shilling is 24 farthings.
I was born at the end of 1971 so the switch occurred a few months before I did. But the sixpence coin was still in circulation up until 1980 and although they weren’t common, they weren’t rare either. It was very confusing to have a coin called six pence that was only worth 2 and a half pence.
Yes, but when it comes to reading things set in earlier english time periods, they don’t usually lay out the coinage system. It took quite a lot of reading as a child before I figured out the relationships between the coins, the difference between a sovereign, a guinea and a quid and so on.
What do students do for lunch, then? Does everyone just bring their lunch from home? Plenty of American students do bring lunch from home, but there’s always or nearly always the option to buy a lunch at school. The quality and variety of the food available varies a lot from place to place, though.
The first (and as far as I can remember, more extensive) exposure I’ve had to this routine came from Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rain Man. Unlike other comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy or even Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Abbott and Costello are not particularly well known in Spain.
The routine in the movie was dubbed in Spanish: “Quién está primero.” and so on. It was probably equally unfunny and made the same amount of sense. (well, except that I guess the translator mistook the base number for starting order, come to think about it.)
I was well into my twenties when I found out that circumcision was a common practice in the US. Mostly because it’s not something usually discussed in mainstream media.
I remember watching a Seinfeld episode in high school, where Jerry asked Elaine whether she’d ever seen a uncircumcised penis, and she replied that yes, once. That puzzled me for a while. At first I thought that it was a wrong translation, and that the original actually was asking the opposite, if she had ever seen a circumcised one, but that made no sense, since she had dated Seinfeld, and Seinfeld is Jewish, yet she seemed to be talking about somebody else’s genitalia.
‘Well’, I though. ‘Maybe she just dates a lot of Jewish guys’.
I didn’t get it until some years later, when the girls in a group of friends started discussing an episode from “Sex in the City”. In that episode, apparently, the usually extremely experienced group of women claimed that not a single one amongst them had ever had sex with an uncircumcised member. And then somebody in the group explained that, yeah, everybody cuts their tips over there, even Christians.
When I was at school, yes. My primary school didn’t even have a tuck shop that I recall.
In high school lots of people brought lunch from home or there was a tuck shop (selling things like pies, sausage rolls, hamburgers, drinks, etc) but there wasn’t a big hall in which everyone sat and ate their lunch the way you see in American TV shows/movies.
So where did we eat our lunch? Outside, or if we were using one of the classrooms for a club or society meeting, then in there.
If it was bucketing with rain they’d open the main assembly hall up for people to eat lunch in there but it was never a popular option among my friends; it was mildly uncool at best.
I knew a couple who were Randy and Candy. Her real name was Candace but I have no idea what his name was. I had the hardest time keeping a straight face.
Martini Enfield has already covered it - but the standard practise was to bring sandwiches from home.
Much like him, NONE of the four primary schools I attended had a tuck shop.
My secondary school was in a rural area (about 160 pupils from age 11 to 17), no tuck shop, you were allowed to “go downtown” to buy from the takeaway shop once a week.
I seem to remember, one of my schools arranging delivery from the local bakery once a week - order taken in the morning, and then delivered just before lunch.
What you are calling a college, I would term a Faculty (eg: Engineering Faculty) except of course, our university had a Teacher’s College - which was in some way affiliated, but also under different management on a different site than the “main” university
Fanny is a nickname for Frances, which was a common name a century plus ago. Famous one was Fanny Crosby, blind hymnast who wrote hundreds of hymns, some of which are still sung.
There was a Randall who was one of the parents, at my kids’preschool, an American guy. When he introduced himself, he would straight away comment about the obvious nickname. He was generally just called Randall. I wasn’t that close to him, but if he were a member of my family I might call him Ran, I think.
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