{"id":79032,"date":"2014-11-04T12:49:59","date_gmt":"2014-11-04T17:49:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=79032"},"modified":"2014-11-05T08:24:53","modified_gmt":"2014-11-05T13:24:53","slug":"a-penny-saved-is-a-waste-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/04\/a-penny-saved-is-a-waste-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"A Penny Saved Is a Waste of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>How our coins got their names.<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_79035\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/1909_us_penny.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-79035\" class=\"wp-image-79035\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/1909_us_penny.jpg\" alt=\"1909_US_Penny\" width=\"600\" height=\"303\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/1909_us_penny.jpg 2200w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/1909_us_penny-300x151.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/1909_us_penny-1024x516.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-79035\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The 1909 penny.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Election Day is here again, and I know there are some single-issue voters out there who haven\u2019t forgotten an issue of our time that Congress has repeatedly failed to act on, despite the introduction of bills HR 3761 in 1989, HR 2528 in 2001, and HR 5818 in 2006. President Obama has stated that he is in favor\u2014the lobbyists for outnumber the lobbyists against\u2014and yet the Price Rounding Act, the Legal Tender Modernization Act, and the Currency Overhaul for an Industrious Nation (<small>COIN<\/small>) Act, respectively, have all failed to pass. As a nation, we have yet <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Penny_debate_in_the_United_States\" target=\"_blank\">to abolish the penny<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>A penny costs more to produce than it is worth (even after the 1982 change from a 95 percent copper composition to 97.5 percent zinc), so the U.S. loses tens of millions of dollars a year minting them; the sheer cost of lost time spent hunting for pennies, waiting in line behind someone else hunting for pennies, and disposing of pointless pennies once we have them has been estimated at as high as a billion dollars a year. No coin in U.S. history has ever been worth less than a penny is today, by a long shot: the half cent, eliminated in 1857, was worth more than a dime in today\u2019s buying power. A penny saved may be a penny earned, but it is about two seconds of income for an average American, so who cares. Yet again, the Ben Franklin for our time turns out to be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.indiebound.org\/book\/9780156717205?aff=theparisreview\" target=\"_blank\">Andy Warhol<\/a>: \u201cI hate PENNIES. I wish they\u2019d stop making them altogether. I would never save them. I don\u2019t have the time. I like to say in stores, \u2018Oh forget it, keep those pennies. It makes my French wallet too heavy.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n<p>One thing we\u2019ll lose, when the penny eventually goes the inevitable way of the half cent and the Canadian penny (extinct as of 2012), is the last possible link between our language of money and the everyday physical world. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>A quarter is a fourth of a dollar, a dime a tenth (Old French <em>d\u00eeme<\/em>, Latin <em>decima<\/em>), a cent a hundredth or one percent\u2014all math. Anyway, a cent is not a piece of money: a U.S. penny is technically a cent or one-cent coin, but in spoken language, a cent is a value and a penny is a coin. We offer someone our two cents, not two pennies; pennies can clink in your pocket, cents can\u2019t. (When Americans adopted the British term <em>penny<\/em> in 1793, they took over the distinction, too: in England between <em>pennies<\/em> and <em>pence<\/em>.)<\/p>\n<p><em>Nickel<\/em> refers to something specific, but also tautological and unreal. A nickel is made out of nickel, the little devil, a diminutive Old Nick: a <em>Nickel<\/em> in German is a goblin or rascal, and nickel ore was called <em>Kupfernickel<\/em>, or devil\u2019s copper, mischievously tricking miners and yielding no copper despite its coppery appearance. (The German etymology is why <em>nickel<\/em> ends in &#8211;<em>el<\/em>, not &#8211;<em>le<\/em>, like another German import, <em>pumpernickel<\/em>.)<\/p>\n<p>As for <em>penny<\/em>, its etymology is uncertain, though the ending implies a Germanic origin\u2014the word used to be <em>penning<\/em>, with an <em>-ing<\/em>,\u00a0like <em>shilling<\/em> and <em>farthing<\/em>, instead of a <em>-y<\/em>. The root may be <em>Pfand<\/em>, which turned into the English word <em>pawn<\/em> meaning \u201ca pledge or token\u201d: in that case, <em>penny<\/em> basically just means money. Or it may derive from the German <em>Pfanne<\/em>, \u201cpan,\u201d the round metal thing that you cook in. My head says it\u2019s <em>pawn<\/em>: the pan pun sounds like classic folk etymology that somebody simply made up. But my heart belongs to <em>Pfanne:\u00a0<\/em>surely the original coin goes back to some concrete reality, an object of actual use.<\/p>\n<p>What about dollars? They have a definite birthday, January 15, 1520, when Bohemia\u2019s Counts von Schlick began minting coins from silver mined in St. Joachim\u2019s Dale: Joachimsthal (now known as J\u00e1chymov, Czech Republic, near Karlovy Vary). These coins were called <em>Joachimsthaler<\/em>, soon shortened to <em>thaler<\/em>. (The <em>H<\/em> is silent, the vowels pronounced just as they are in <em>dollar<\/em>.)<\/p>\n<p>Dollars also have a brother of sorts, a demon far worse than the tricky <em>Nickel<\/em>: pitchblende. (<em>Pitch<\/em> refers to its black color; <em>blende<\/em> is another kind of ore, from the German <em>blenden<\/em>, deceive, because the material was dense enough to be metal but had no known economic uses. Those German miners were fooled again.) It was pitchblende, now called uraninite, from Joachimsthal, in which Marie Sk\u0142odowska-Curie discovered and isolated radium, leading to her Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 and her death from radiation exposure in 1934, five years after a certain golemically named Dr L\u00f6wy of Prague had shown that \u201cmysterious emanations\u201d in the mine led to cancer. (Miners: 0 for 3.) Until World War I, the birthplace of the dollar was the only known source of radium in the world. Get rid of the penny and, maybe it\u2019s only fair, self-referential fractions and nuclear poison will be all we have left for the meaning of money.<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.damionsearls.com\" target=\"_blank\">Damion Searls<\/a>, the Daily\u2019s language columnist, is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How our coins got their names. Election Day is here again, and I know there are some single-issue voters out there who haven\u2019t forgotten an issue of our time that Congress has repeatedly failed to act on, despite the introduction of bills HR 3761 in 1989, HR 2528 in 2001, and HR 5818 in 2006. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":754,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[684],"tags":[13320,15916,15919,15917,11567,15915,15920,10882,15921,13202,15914,15913,15918],"class_list":["post-79032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-language","tag-bohemia","tag-cents","tag-coins","tag-copper","tag-currency","tag-dimes","tag-dollars","tag-etymology","tag-joachimsthal","tag-metal","tag-nickels","tag-pennies","tag-quarters"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>A Penny Saved Is a Waste of Time<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Damion Searls on how our coins got their names.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/04\/a-penny-saved-is-a-waste-of-time\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Penny Saved Is a Waste of Time by Damion Searls\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"November 4, 2014 \u2013 How our coins got their names. Election Day is here again, and I know there are some single-issue voters out there who haven\u2019t forgotten an issue of our\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/04\/a-penny-saved-is-a-waste-of-time\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-11-04T17:49:59+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2014-11-05T13:24:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/1909_us_penny.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1110\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Damion Searls\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" 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