Re: OT: the euro & 01.01.02 (was NATLANG/FONT:)

Nik Taylor scripsit:

> US money was set up with more than just dollars and cents.  There was a
> unit above the dollar, the Eagle (10 dollars), the dime was 1/10 dollar,
> the cent 1/100, and the mil (used only for tax purposes) is 1/1000
> dollar.
"Mill", not "mil".  These were Thomas Jefferson's original names, and
apparently the first proposed decimal currency ever to actually get used.

> Everything smaller than the dollar, except for one cent and half cent,
Which were (and are, in the case of the cent) copper.  The other coins are
copper-nickel alloy, with the outer surfaces having enough nickel to
look silver; the dollar coin has some kind of veneer (brass?) that makes
it look gold.

Canadian coins look essentially the same, but with different markings
on the faces, of course.  Nickel is ferromagnetic, and in the 60s
(perhaps still?) one could tell a Canadian nickel from a U.S. one
because the former, but not the latter, would stick to a permanent magnet.

> were silver, everything above was gold.  I'm not sure if there were
> There's also the "bit", 1/8 dollar (i.e.,
> 12.5 cents), but I don't think there was ever an actual US coin for
> that, altho it was the exact equivalent of the Spanish real.
I think not, but it used to be common to price articles at 1 bit,
meaning you could pay for them with a dime and receive no change,
or with a quarter and receive a dime in change -- it balances out.
I remember being a child in the early 60s and not knowing what
"two bits" (a quarter) meant.

<rant>Pennies are a god-awful nuisance and should be abolished.  We
spend a fortune in minting them every year, and most of them go straight
to coin jars and stay there almost forever.  It costs something like
US$0.30 to make a hundred of them.  You can't buy anything with one.
It's only the fanatical conservatism of the U.S. in such matters that
keeps them in being at all.</rant>

--
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
Please leave your values        |       Check your assumptions.  In fact,
   at the front desk.           |          check your assumptions at the door.
     --sign in Paris hotel      |            --Miles Vorkosigan

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