People didn't like it.

Huh. That's...y'know I'm not getting over this people-disagreeing-with-me thing any time soon, I feel. I mean, in theory I understand the concept, but my inner egomaniac keeps getting confused (which, now that I think about it, is probably linked to that badge she made for herself which clearly declares her the Grand Arbiter of Taste, May All Other Opinions Bow Before Their Rightful Master. I'd take it away, but she seems so attached to it...)

(Of course, if you are me, and you are terminally lazy, you eat them skin and all.)

Okay, I'm pretty lazy--if I can't take it out of the fridge and put it in my mouth then it's too much work, but I draw the line at eating furry skin. Which explains why I hardly ever eat kiwi fruit anymore.

And on an entirely unrelated topic (well, I could've worked in a furry-related segue, but see above mentioned laziness)--what is it with cats and boxes? I don't get it. My parents are moving down to the coast, and my cat insists on helping by investigating every single box and then sitting in each one for ten minutes like box-sitting is the new catnip. He almost died an ignominious death by photo-album earlier today, the silly thing.

Anything that involves the creation of a brand new typographical symbol (and therefore the obsolescence of billions of keyboards) is OK by me.

I'm not sure I'd even thought about that before, Angus. V. cool!

Which makes me wonder, though--where did we get the idea for "dollars"? The word, the symbol, whatever? Why aren't we still using pounds? And how did Canada and Australia and NZ also end up with dollars? Was there a secret "change pounds to dollars!" movement within the UK whilst everyone was emigrating out?

In the mountains of northwestern Bohemia, just a few kilometers south of the East German-Czechoslovakian border, is the small town of Jachymov. In the sixteenth century, a silver mine was opened nearby and coins were minted to which the name joachimstaler was applied. In German this was shortened to taler. Shortly afterwards the Dutch or Low German form daler was borrowed into English to refer to the taler and other coins that were patterned after it. From this the word Dollar was adopted by the American Constitution as the money unit of United States of America.

That would be my guess, anyway.

I don't know where the word "dollar" comes from (wait, yes I do, Main Entry: dol·lar Pronunciation: 'dä-l&r Function: noun Usage: often attributive Etymology: Dutch or Low German daler, from German Taler, short for Joachimstaler, from Sankt Joachimsthal, Bohemia, where talers were first made Date: 1553 1 : TALER 2 : any of numerous coins patterned after the taler (as a Spanish peso) 3 a : any of various basic monetary units (as in the U.S. and Canada) -- ), but the typographic symbol is reputed to come from laying a U over a S and getting the $ sign (only it should have two vertical bars, not one).

My psychic powers are telling me that Billytea knows the answer to all these questions.

Ah! The U over S thing, that I think I'd heard before. Cool.

And yay for the etymology too. But I'm still wondering how it got popular. Am also still amused by the old non-decimal or whatever British system in old books. Confusing as hell, but interesting and bizarre.

meara! Welcome back! How was your trip?

I've got nothing on topic to say. But meara was away from the USA, so it's somehow UnAmerican.

[Edit: And I'm looking for someone to share this post # with me]

meara, I was reading the money chart in Merriam-Webster, and wondered that myself. I still don't have mastery of pounds/shillings/bob/whatever as the money system was back in Jane Austen's, or Dickens's, day. Actually, I kept getting the sense that there was more than one overlapping money system, since shillings always seemed to divide up with a remainder left over.

Any kind soul care to explicate?

A pound was twenty shillings (a guinea twenty-one), a shilling twelve pence. So you had to do two divisions (L/20 remainder S, S/12 r D) in order to convert a number to pounds, shillings, and pence.

[L = Pounds (librum), S = Shillings, D = Pence (Denarius).]

[link]

And for conversion to decimal, a shilling is 20 pence.