Complex Numbers

Dolla Bill Yo

A while back, I shared an article on the origins of the semicolon: "Semicolonoscopy" 

Today, I want to talk about a far more important symbol.



https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190528-the-curious-origin-of-the-symbol

The curious origins of the dollar symbol
Despite its ubiquity, the origins of the dollar sign remain far from clear, with competing theories touching on Bohemian coins, the Pillars of Hercules and harried merchants.

Fascinating that this is from BBC, yes? Also note the author's name is Hepzibah, which is on my list of all-time most awesome names.

It’s shorthand for the American dream and all the consumerism and commodification that comes with it, signifying at once sunny aspiration, splashy greed and rampant capitalism. It’s been co-opted by pop culture (think Ke$ha when she first started out, or any number of fast-fashion t-shirts)...

I still call Ke$ha "Key-dollar-ha." When I mention her name. Which isn't often.

If you had to find letters lurking in its form, you might spy an ‘S’ overlain with a squeezed, bend-less ‘U’ providing its vertical strokes. In fact, this accounts for one of the most popular misconceptions about the sign’s origins: it stands for United States, right?

That's actually what my mom taught me at an early age. Even then, I think I had my doubts, mostly because most of the dollar signs I saw had the one upright instead of two.

That’s what writer and philosopher and famed libertarian Ayn Rand believed. In a chapter in her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, one character asks another about what the dollar sign stands for.

Yeah... anything Ayn Rand says is bullshit until proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. Still, just because she had a character say it, that doesn't mean she believed it.

The dollar, meanwhile, has a far shorter history. In 1520, the Kingdom of Bohemia began minting coins using silver from a mine in Joachimsthal – which roughly translates from German into English as Joachim’s valley. Logically if unimaginatively, the coin was dubbed the joachimsthaler, which was then shortened to thaler, the word that proceeded to spread around the world. It was the Dutch variation, the daler, that made its way across the Atlantic in the pockets and on the tongues of early immigrants, and today’s American-English pronunciation of the word dollar retains its echoes.

This, actually, I knew. I once spent a lot of time researching the origins of various money words (though not the dollar sign). For instance, the word "money" itself comes from the temple of Juno Moneta. Juno, you know. Moneta was an epithet that, as I understand it, translates to "she who warns," or, more simply and less gender-specific, "warner." The connection is that that particular temple in Rome was used as a vault, one giant cache. From which we get the word "cash."

Yet another version centres on the Pillars of Hercules, a phrase conjured up by the Ancient Greeks to describe the promontories that flank the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar. The pillars feature in Spain’s national coat of arms and, during the 18th and 19th Centuries, appeared on the Spanish dollar, which was otherwise known as the piece of eight, or peso.

Ever wonder why a quarter dollar is sometimes known as "two bits?" That's why. Two bits to a quarter = eight bits to a dollar, or, as noted, historically a peso. It wasn't that long ago that stock market prices were quoted in eighths of dollars - that only changed in, like, the 1990s I think? When computers started taking over. Point is, that method of quoting stock prices harks back to the pieces of eight. Still no good reason to quote gasoline prices to 9/10ths of a cent, though.

As with everything American at the moment, there’s a partisan dimension to the debate about the dollar sign’s ancestry: for duelling political reasons, one faction favours the idea that it’s homegrown, another that it was imported.

Figures.

And as for the first printed dollar sign, that was made on a Philadelphia printing press in the 1790s and was the work of a staunch American patriot – or at least a vehemently anti-English Scotsman – named Archibald Binny, who’s today remembered as the creator of the Monticello typeface.

I remember no such thing. I only care about who created Comic Sans.

Anyway, I just find this sort of thing fascinating, so here it is.