On 6/29/19 3:39 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: > You use nicknames for 2 denominations which most of us foreigners > don't know -- I still don't know which is a "nickel" (which is a metal > to me) and which is a "dime" (which is a Swedish chocolate-covered > sweet bar, of which I'm very fond but can't eat because I'm > overweight).
There we share a culture with the British (e.g. "tanner", "quid", "nicker", "guinea"). However,I'll also say that younger Americans are unfamiliar with older US slang for various denominations. For example, "bit" = 12.5 cents hails back to the Spanish custom of dividing the Real (milled dollar--wonder how many young Spaniards know about that?) into eight pieces, hence, "pieces of eight". So "two bits" is a quarter dollar (our term "dollar" hails back to the Bohemian "Joachimsthaler"). Fin = 5 dollars, sawbuck = 10 dollars, double-sawbuck = 20 dollars, frog = 50 dollars, C-note = 100 dollars... --Chuck