During An Exchange of Currencies - *grins* Information

[charisstoma]

From banks and banking this arose over at meep's place.

Explanation from Meep:

£1 (pound) = 100p (pence)
Coins are silver in colour - 5p,10p,20p,50p
Then gold in colour - £1, £2 (actually silver with gold edging)
Then whats known as 'coppers' originlly made of copper (less so today) - 1p, 2p


Wiki-knowledge:

Sovereign -a historic gold coin of the United Kingdom, with a nominal value of one pound sterling but in practice used as a bullion coin.
In 2013 the Royal Mint announced that it would restart the manufacture of sovereigns in India to cater to the Indian market. These sovereigns will be minted by Indian gold producer MMTC-PAMP to Royal Mint specification. (Okay we all agree that I'm suspicious. Math question: Considering greed, how much lead needs to be coated in gold before it meets weight and appearance of the Royal Mint specification?" *coughs* Just kidding.*coughs*)

Shilling - comes from an accounting term that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times, deemed to be the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere. There counted twelve pence to the shilling, with twenty shillings to the pound. The British shilling had succeeded the English shilling, and it remained in circulation until Decimal Day 1971, Upon decimalisation the British shilling was superseded by the five-pence piece having a comparable value, size and weight and later withdrawn from circulation in 1990, when the five pence piece was reduced in size.

Guinea - the first English machine-struck gold coin, originally worth one pound sterling,[1] equal to twenty shillings until 1816, its value was officially fixed at twenty-one shillings. Following that, Great Britain adopted the gold standard and guinea became a colloquial or specialised term. Although no longer circulated, the term guinea survives in; notably horse racing and the sale of rams, to mean an amount of one pound and one shilling (21 shillings) or one pound and five pence in decimalised currency.

Comments

[2metaldog.livejournal.com]

British money is complicated. The only thing going for ours is that it's know pretty much the world over as Monoply money. Oh, we also don't have $1 or $2 bills any more or the penny. We have coins for both (the loonie and twoonie) and pennies were phased out coming up on a year ago. Our money is also slowly being replaced with a polymer bill instead of the paper/linen that was previously used. There's also holograms and see-thru windows on them.

We do have cool stuff on our money though. All our money is designed to make it easier for the blind to know what coins/bills they're handling. The coins are specific shapes and edged in specific patterns so that you can tell what they are by touching the edges/size. All bills have braille in the upper right-hand corner identifying the denomination.

Penny (no longer in production): maple leaf
Nickle: beaver
Dime: Blue-nose schooner
quarter: moose
$1 coin: (silver colour) loon on a lake
$2 coin: (gold centre disk with silver surround) polar bear on ice
$5: (blue bill) picture of the Canadarm and an astronaut doing a space walk
$10: (purple bill) train traveling through the Rockies
$20: (green bill) Vimy Ridge WW2 memorial
$50: (red bill) research ice breaker going through ice
$100: (brown bill) scientist doing scientist stuff

[charisstoma.livejournal.com]

I should have put a link back to Meep's lj account where I mentioned something that Canada and the U.S. have in common, the Mill.

Most people aren't aware of what they are called, just that the government takes your assessed property's property value and moves the decimal over 3 places to the left to compute how much tax you'll pay yearly on the property.

mill (mɪl) n.

1. (Units) a US and Canadian monetary unit used in calculations, esp for property taxes, equal to one thousandth of a dollar or 1/10 of a cent.

[C18: short for Latin mīllēsimum a thousandth (part)]
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

[2metaldog.livejournal.com]

the mill... unless you live in Toronto, yes. If you live in Toronto... that's a whole lot of screwy right there. Depending on where you live, you property tax is either crazy high or stupidly low based on a completely different system of figuring out value.

People on the Toronto Islands have houses worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars but due to a 99 year land lease deal with the city/province (it was a vote buying scheme of the NDP), their homes are assessed at values of around... I think 60K was the most expensive. Their lease payment is something like $100 a year. Can you say entitled? I knew you could. And yes, that is why I make some not-so-subtle digs at the Islanders in my zombie novel.

[charisstoma.livejournal.com]

Ah, an insider jab at Toronotoan's whatever people who live in Toronto are called.

[seeking-galileo.livejournal.com]

Torontonians (or the stuck up city folk who think they are better than the rest of Onterrible...err Ontario). And ontarians (or as I say Ontarioians cause it's more fun to say). :P

[charisstoma.livejournal.com]

If Ontario is Ontarioians *GRINS* I like that.
can't Toronto be Torontoians? Suppose you could shorten it to Wrong-toe-ians.

[seeking-galileo.livejournal.com]

I spent much time out West explaining that Toronto was pronounced as 'Trono'. For some reason 'tronoians' is just not as much fun to say as 'ontarioians'. Out West is where I picked up the lovely title of 'Onterrible' for Ontario. Lots and lots of bitter ex-Ontarioians out West.

[seeking-galileo.livejournal.com]

I have an awesome picture from Facebook with all our pretty coloured non-paper money on it. It's a statement about our rainbow money being the worlds first openly gay currency. But eljay isn't letting me post anything from my computer :(

[2metaldog.livejournal.com]

Openly gay money *sporfles*. I have to say that it is a great conversation starter when you're out of country. And having denomination colour coding makes for some interesting mental games when handling other nation's currency when it's a single colour.

One of the times that I was in the US (I was at a con) and opened my wallet to pay for something and got all excited for about 2 seconds when all I saw were green bills in my wallet. I was like, "Hot damn! I'm freaking rich!". It was a downer to realize my wallet was not filled with $20's but assorted, lower denomination bills (mostly $1's *sigh*).

[charisstoma.livejournal.com]

As a child my family camped near Montreal. The campground had an icecream van and I was given some Canadian money to buy some. TOO MANY colors. The nice man got impatient and reached into my hand to extract what was needed to buy a cone.
*grins* That was the same place where we kids came back to report to my mother that there was a lady cooking pinecones for dinner.
Mom went to talk to the lady and returned laughing... Artichokes.