Made In America - Bill Bryson [46]
A notable absentee from the list of early American coins is nickel. There was a coin worth five cents but it was called a half dime or jitney, from the French jeton, signifying a small coin or a token. When early in this century American cities began to fill with buses that charged a five-cent fare, jitney fell out of use for the coin and attached itself instead to the vehicles. Nickel didn’t become synonymous with the five-cent piece until 1875; before that nickel signified either a one-cent or three-cent piece. The phrase ‘don’t take any wooden nickels’ dates only from 1915 – and, no, there never was a time when wooden nickels circulated. Such a coin would have been immediately recognizable as counterfeit and in any case would have cost more to manufacture than it was worth.
One of the more durable controversies in the world of numismatics is where the dollar sign comes from. The first use of $ in an American context is in 1784 in a memorandum from Thomas Jefferson suggesting the dollar as the primary unit of currency, and some have deduced from this that he made it up there and then, either as a monogram based on his own initials (improbable; he was not that vain) or as a kind of doodle (equally improbable; he was not that unsystematic). A more widely held notion is that it originated as the letters U and S superimposed on each other and that the U eventually disintegrated into unconnected parallel lines. The problem with this theory is that $ as a symbol for peso far outdates its application to US dollars. (It is still widely used as a peso sign throughout Latin America.) The most likely explanation is that it is a modified form of the pillars of Hercules, wrapped around with a scroll, to be found on old Spanish pieces of eight.
Many slang terms and other like expressions associated with money date from the nineteenth century. Americans have been describing money as beans (as in ‘I haven’t got a bean’) since 1810 and as dough since at least 1851, when it was first recorded in the Yale Tomahawk. Small change has been around since 1819, not worth a cent since the early 1820s, and not worth a red cent since 1839. Upper crust dates from 1832, easy money from 1836, C-note (short for century note) for a $100 bill from 1839, flat broke and dead broke from the 1840s. Americans have been referring to a dollar as a buck since 1856 (it comes from buckskin, an early unit of exchange). Sound as a dollar, bet your bottom dollar, strike it rich, penny-ante and spondulicks or spondulix (a term of wholly mysterious origin) all date from the 1850s. A $10 bill has been a sawbuck since the early 1860s. It was so called because the original bills had a roman numeral X on them, which brought to mind a saw-horse, or sawbuck. Mazuma, from a Yiddish slang term for money, dates from 1880, and simoleon, another word of uncertain provenance, meaning $1, dates from 1881.
But it wasn’t just money terms that America developed in the nineteenth century. A flood, a positive torrent, of words and expressions of all types came out of the country in the period. The following is no more than a bare sampling: to make the fur fly (1804); quick on the trigger and to whitewash (1808); having an ax to grind (1811); keep a stiff upper lip (yes, it’s an Americanism, 1815); no two ways about it (1818); fly off the handle (1825); to move like greased lightning (1826); to have a knockdown and dragout fight (1827); to sit on the fence and to go the whole hog (1828); firecracker, hornswoggle, non-committal and to be in cahoots with (1829); ornery and talk turkey (1830); horse