Mal ,'Trash'
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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).]
And for conversion to decimal, a shilling is 20 pence.
IIRC, there was a major movement in the post-Revolution America to adopt anything-but-pounds as a monetary system. (Spanish silver dollars were very popular, as were francs -- but both empires were in major straits at the time. 'Dollars' was settled on as a monetary designation that upset the fewest people.)
Also there are other weird oddities you have to learn. A bob is a shilling, a crown is five shillings (I think?), so half a crown is 2s 6d. A farthing is 1/4 of a penny, and a ha'penny is self-explanatory.
The guinea is the weirdest of the lot though.
And for conversion to decimal, a shilling is 20 pence.
Aaah! My brain!
t explodes
Any kind soul care to explicate?
It had something to do with Plantagenet Palliser....
Things I'm glad I was too young to have to deal with - I only know the shillings thing because they were still in circulation when i was a kid. Actually, I'm wrong - 1 shilling=5 new pence