A Penny of Observation
ARMADO : How hast thou purchased this experience I Mom : By my penny of observation.
(Love's Labour's Lost.)
COINING.
A movement is on foot—a safe phrase, that, for what movement is not ? but perhaps we had better be honest— very well, then, someone has written to The Times saying that we ought to rationalize our currency by reverting to a standard guinea made up of twenty-five shillings of 10d. each. " What the name of the new coin would be," writes the author of this doubtless admirable project, " hardly matters." A ridiculous statement I Of course the name matters enormously. Now there are four possible ways of finding a name for a new token of exchange. One is to do nothing about it at all, in which case the people who use it will invent their own name for it : recent additions to the popular vocabulary—" talkie," " hike," " tote," and so on—show how fatal this would be. The second is to
concoct, probably with the help of the B.B.C., some dis- gusting freak, like " neoquid " or " novosov." The third —which no one would ever dream of adopting—is to raid the coffers of the past for a good, rich, romantic name like doubloon, or an honest, earthy one like groat. The fourth,
and best of all, is to blindfold the Governor of the Bank of England and make him stick knitting needles into a folded copy of The Times until he has transfixed seven or eight consecutive letters which can be pronounced as a word.
If it is a fairly ridiculous one, like singfat, droodle, or pipicue, so much the better. We (for one) should derive a certain satisfaction from tying such a tin to Mammon's tail.
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