"half-dollar"/"50 cent piece" Was: Recovering the ROM of an IBM 5100 using OCR

[Chuck Guzis]

On 6/29/19 3:39 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:

> You use nicknames for 2 denominations which most of us foreigners
> don't know -- I still don't know which is a "nickel" (which is a metal
> to me) and which is a "dime" (which is a Swedish chocolate-covered
> sweet bar, of which I'm very fond but can't eat because I'm
> overweight).

There we share a culture with the British (e.g. "tanner", "quid",
"nicker", "guinea").

However,I'll also say that younger Americans are unfamiliar with older
US slang for various denominations. For example, "bit" = 12.5 cents
hails back to the Spanish custom of dividing the Real (milled
dollar--wonder how many young Spaniards know about that?) into eight
pieces, hence, "pieces of eight".  So "two bits" is a quarter dollar
(our term "dollar" hails back to the Bohemian "Joachimsthaler").

Fin = 5 dollars, sawbuck = 10 dollars, double-sawbuck = 20 dollars, frog
= 50 dollars, C-note = 100 dollars...

--Chuck