Shame, shame, Cecil.
If our teeming little forum here has taught us anything, it’s two things: Preview, Spellcheck! On a column over twenty years old, no less!
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_336b.html
(promptly shuffles off to hide from the Master’s wrath.)
You know, I came in here to call you on that typo when it turns out the typo is from the original article! However, I would never ever ever even consider that the all-knowing Cecil did this. Undoubtedly it was some lowly clerk transcribing the original article who is to blame. This person should be found and held to accompt for their actions!
Of course this is one of those common cases when spell checking will be of absolutely no help. “Mill” is a valid word just not this one.
Erm, you’ve missed the entire point of this thread … check the title again.
I realize (and realized) that Ashtar had a “mistake” in the title of his thread. I wasn’t sure if it was a typo, a joke, or a subtle comment on Cecil’s column. My comment, however, was about the original column and the misuse of “mill” for “mil”.
While “coint” is an obvious typo (or at least it’s obviously not the right word even it it was done purposefully), “mill” is not obviously wrong – at least to the so-called editor who clearly must have “corrected” the column which was undoubtedly correct when Cecil wrote it originally.
Furthemore, this is exactly the type of error that spell checking will not correct.
OK, so, what is a mil(l) coin? Is it something I’d know about if I were older than that article?
Probably if you paid real estate taxes – not a mil coin but you’d know what a mil is.
As the column says a mil is a thousandth of a dollar or a tenth of a cent. “Mil” here is from Latin “mille” thousand and where we get millennium (a thousad years), mile (orignally 1000 paces) and all the metric units like millemeter (a thousandth of a meter). You most commonly hear the word mil in the phrase mil rate when referring to property taxes. A mil rate of 35 means the tax is 35/1000 of the assessed value of the property.
There are no and never have been an mil coins used in the US. (If almost no one cares about pennies anymore, can you imagine how many mil coins would be junked if we had them.)
A “milled” coin, on the other hand, is a coin like a quarter and unlike a penny that has those ridges on the edge.
Actually, you appear to be wrong. The US money of account equal to the tenth part of a cent is a mill.
“Mil”, other than being an abbreviation for “military”, means one one-thousandth of an inch.
Wrong. Cecil even mentioned states coining them for sales tax collection. (When sales tax is 1% and the average sale is a nickel for a candy bar, you can see the problem – either collect too much or skip over many small sales entirely, leaving merchants holding the bag.)
I have some Missouri mil (mill? I don’t care) coins in my collection. They are made of plastic, about the size of a nickel in diameter, but thinner. The 1-mil ones are red, the 5-mil ones are green. Shortly after manufacture, all became curled just like Pringle’s chips.
But they don’t taste as good.
My mom and stepdad argued abou this once, so I was glad to see the article. My mom remembers seeing mill coins, but she grew up in Missouri …
I remember my father having what he called “mill coins” but I thought he meant coins that came from the local mill!
*Almost * right. The US Mint has never minted any and the US has never issued any. But, yes, some States have done so.
Just wanted to note that in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court “The Boss”, Hank Morgan, introduces Americanized currency into Arthur’s Britaion, including not only Mil(l) coins but also smaller coins representing “Milrays” (in his seriously pre-inflation Dark Age Britain, prices are so low that a Cent is an incredibly valuable coin).
Don’t recall offhand how he spells it.
“Milray”. I have no idea where he got the word – in the real world, it is a family name, nothing else, and the Yankee offers no explanation.