In message <[log in to unmask]>, Christian 
Lheureux <[log in to unmask]> writes
>Wirt wrote :
>  In 1964, when I was 18 and on Guam as a junior scientist,  tracking 
>geodetic  satellites for the good of all humanity, I went to the bank 
>at Anderson AFB and  asked the teller to change my $100 bill for four 
>$25 bills.  She just looked  at me and laughed.   Up to that point, I 
>had never paid much attention to what  denominations money  came in and 
>I simply extrapolated that if quarters existed,  $25 bills would  too. 
>After all, who makes a twenty cent piece?   Later, in 1972, when I was 
>26 and a slightly older junior  scientist, now  doing entomology for 
>the good of all humanity, I tried to  make a semi-long  distance phone 
>call in New

A semi-long distance call from New Zealand? Must have been to the 
Nutsfords... :-)

>Zealand, but things didn't go  well. The phone ate my  money, so I 
>called the operator. He asked me what coins I put  into the phone. I 
>said a nickle and a dime. He just laughed and said, "You're  American, 
>aren't you?" They don't seem to call 5 and 10 cent pieces in New 
>Zealand nickles and  dimes.

>> I no longer give anyone money without a bit of lingering fear of being
>> laughed at.
>> Wirt Atmar

Try me - I reckon I could keep a straight face.

>I got quite similar experiences, just the other way round.

>In 1971, at age 11, I was getting my first English lessons in junior high. I
>remember that lesson where we were supposed to learn about British currency
>at that time. The pound was divided in 20 shillings, each shilling worth 12
>pence (abbreviated d, from the latin word denarius, or the smallest amount
>of money you can get, not p for pence), not pennies, pence.

True about the d - £16 12s 6d, now there's a price to conjure with...

But d wasn't by any means the smallest. The smallest coin in my 
collection is a third of a farthing (farthing = fourthing, a quarter of 
a penny). So that was a twelfth of a penny.

Half a penny was quite common - usually called a ha'penny (pronounced 
ape-nee - or hape-nee if you were posh.)

It went up ha'penny, penny, penny-ha'penny, tuppence, tuppence-ha'penny, 
thruppence. Thruppence normally came in the form of a thruppeny bit 
(pronounced thrupp-nee bit), which was a twelve-sided greeny-browny 
coin, quite different from the bronze ha'pennies and pennies. I also 
have a silver thruppenny bit, though they stopped a long time before. It 
looks like a smaller version of the tanner or sixpence.

The shilling, or bob, was also silver, as was the two-bob bit (or florin 
if you were posh). Next up, also silver, was the half-crown, or 
half-a-crown, which was a coin worth 2s 6d. There *was* a crown - five 
bob - but that was pretty rare. You got them at coronations and things, 
as souvenirs, and kept them in a plastic case, as heirlooms.

Ten bob came as an orange note, and the pound, or quid, as a green one. 
Fivers - five quid - were big white things that they had to discontinue 
in case Hitler's attempts at forging them had been successful. We had a 
smaller blue one after that.

There may well have been bigger notes, but you could buy pretty much 
anything less than a really big-ticket item like a house, a car or a 
television set with a tenner, so we didn't need them..... :-)

>Some "salaries" (sorry, the exact term now escapes me) were denominated 
>in guineas, each guinea worth 21 shillings (IIRC). Useless to say, I've 
>never seen any coin or note denominated in guineas.

Guineas were posh quids. 21 bob indeed. That first TV was 80 gns, a 
euphemism for the actual £84 0s 0d you found yourself paying out for 
something you'd had to screw yourself up to affording at 'eighty'....

Very handy in negotiation - you said 'two hundred', and if the guy said 
'pounds?', sort of hopefully, you quickly said 'guineas'. Whereas if he 
said 'two hundred??!!!' you knew there was nothing left on the table, so 
you said 'pounds', as if you were giving him a 5% discount to soften the 
blow.....

We have something similar today, but it's called 'ex VAT' and 'including 
VAT', and it's rather more than 5%, so you never soften the blow with 
'inc VAT'...

> The teacher made it easy by sorting out all
>the different coins into copper coins, brass coins and who knows what else.
>The next summer, '72, I had  my first trip to Britain. By that time, they
>had switched to a system with a pound divided into 100 new pence (still no
>pennies, abbreviated p for pence), which made all my previous painstaking
>education irrelevant.At the time, pounds were really banknotes. Now (and for
>a number of years) the British have 1? (pound sign) coins.

£1, and now £2 coins. Originally, we had half-pees (never halfpence or 
ha'pennies) as one new pee was 2.4d, or almost tuppence ha'penny in the 
old money. So a half pee was 1.2d, which held the inflation on 
small-ticket items like penny chews to 20%, at least.


The last coinage to be serious devalued like this was the aitch-pee. 
It's still in circulation (just), but the numbers are steadily 
declining....
-- 
Roy Brown        'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be
Kelmscott Ltd     useful, or believe to be beautiful'  William Morris

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