NAMES FOR MONEY

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 October 1928, Page 9

NAMES FOR MONEY

STORIES OF ORIGIN.

If you were to go to British Guiana you would find coins bearing the inscription “One Stiver” in circulation. Furthermore, they are made at the Royal Mint.

Most of our slang names for coins are of high antiquity (writes David Neville in the “Daily Mail”). They htvvc trickled down to us from an era when currency and exchanges were less highly organised, and, provided .the metal and the weight were up to standard, it mattered little in what land tho coins had been minted. You may see the same state of things in Levante to-day. I remember once, in being given change for an English sovereign in twenty-three- different currencies, including a tetradrachm of a Roman Emperor! Therefore you will’ find the names of foreign coins living on in popular usage. A bob is the fourteenth-cen-tury French bobe. A dollar is the gulden, first coined at Joachimsthal, whose name of “Joachimsthaler gulden” was abbreviated into thaler and corrupted to dollar. “Tanner” came to us from India, where the East India Company’s troops found the local tanga, the nearest equivalent to the nimble sixpence at home. The ticky (the South African name for a, threepenny bit) was the coin which Kaffir labourers exchanged for the ticket given them in payment of wages.

Colour and size played their part in the allocation of names. A “brown” and a. “yellow boy” are as easily understandable as the French blanche moYrnie, but it is not everyone who realises that the old thieves’ jslang of “blunt,” for gold coin, is derived from “blonde monuaie.”

The guinea was first coined in 1.663 for the use of the Royal Company of Adventurers trading on the Guinea Coast of West Africa, so that its name is easily explained. It was not until twenty years or more later, however, that it became common currency •it home. By that time James 11. sat iijion. the throne, and it was promptly dubbed a. “Jimmy.”

Those were days when cheques were little used, and for the convenience of customers banks issued guineas in rouleaux, or packets, of fifty. Just about lhe same time the fifst galloways' had boon introduced from Scotland, and popular fancy, amused by this half-sized quadruped, called half a rouleaux, or twenty-five guineas, a. pony. The term is still in common usage in sporting circles. Lastly, the word money itself is very oldfi as old as the Roman temple of Juno Moneta, the mint from which it takes its name.