The Absent Uncle: Inflation

Recently I was sitting with my mind in full idle and somehow the mind wandered into old sayings that somehow had monetary value attached to them. 

First off – have not read any columns or pieces that I am plagiarizing from, nor did I consult AI for the idea or help.

Now back to the mind wandering. Starting from the cheapest.

“A penny for your thoughts”. They stopped making pennies recently because they didn’t add up to much. Also, maybe that is all readers would be willing to pay for some of my thoughts. 

 “Not worth two cents”.  Same thing as a penny, just would take two of them.

“Not worth a plug nickel”.  Think this one had to do with a fake nickel like what would pop out of metal electrical box. Still not worth much even if real in today’s world.

“Here’s a dime, call somebody who cares”. This one was cruel; but try and find a pay phone in today’s world anyway.

“Not worth two bits”. This one always puzzled me; I was told two bits equaled twenty-five cents. I dunno, maybe I was told wrong. Anyway, can’t even get a pack of gum for a quarter.

“A day late and a dollar short”. Try and relate a day to a dollar in today’s world for any kind of value or timing. A dollar just doesn’t buy very much.

“Fake as a three-dollar bill”. I was told that saying came around in popularity after the government started printing two-dollar bills. This one I can still sort of relate to – was always valueless.

 “It’s worth a Lincoln”. Not the car – the five-dollar bill. A five today is still worth something; something that used to cost way less.

“Give you a sawbuck for it”. Never knew what that actually meant until I wrote this column. I heard it used but never settled on a price using the term so did not really know the value. Now I looked it up. If you know what it means you were ahead of me; if you didn’t, I will reveal in a following paragraph.

 “A million-dollar view”. Currently in California that could be in a regular old subdivision looking across the street at your neighbor’s identical home. Otherwise it will be a two-or-three-million-dollar view.

Okay, you get the point. I did some research after listing the sayings.  The two-bit value is from old Spanish coins that were divided into “pieces” and eight of those pieces would equal a dollar so two bits would equal our 25-cent quarter. 

The saw buck also came from history. It seems that our early ten-dollar bill used the Roman Numeral “X” on them which resembled the log holder that was used by lumbermen to hold logs being “sawed”. A sawbuck. 

So, there you have it, idle thoughts from an idle mind.