The auld days of 240 pence to the pound has stumped me once again. I bought a small lot of the 1967-68 preschoolers' comic Pippin from a shop in Nashville. The cover price on each is 7D. What is a D? Does 7D mean 7/12 of a shilling?
D was the old symbol for pence or a penny. As far as I can tell you are right in your other conclusions Grant.
Quote from: Kerrin on 31 July, 2009, 06:55:17 AM
D was the old symbol for pence or a penny. As far as I can tell you are right in your other conclusions Grant.
Yep. twelve pennies to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound.
Cheers
Jim
And thruppence hapenny'd buy you a firkin of porter.
Yup, "d" was commonly used to denote "pence." L/s/d, from the Latin "librae, solidi, denarii" for Pounds, shillings, pence.
Wiki if you're really interested (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_the_pound_sterling#UK_decimal_coinage_history)
Quote from: The Cosh on 31 July, 2009, 11:08:38 AM
Yup, "d" was commonly used to denote "pence." Prices were generally written in L/s/d format, from the Latin "librae, solidi, denarii" for Pounds, shillings, pence.
Wiki if you're really interested (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_the_pound_sterling#UK_decimal_coinage_history)
It's all quite straightforward, really:
The base unit was the Fragment, and there were 16 1/2 Fragments to the Penny (except on alternate Wednesdays, the Queen's (official) birthday and Empire Day when there were 19 3/4 Fragments to the Penny during daylight hours and just 7 Fragments to the Penny during the hours of darkness to dissuade prostitution). There were usually 42 Pennies to the Sub-Shilling (a Sub-Shilling being one eighth of a Pound divided by the month number plus 12 and minus the present Monarch's golf handicap). The Pound was made up of thirty two Randoms or a Squillit, depending on the population of India, and the White Fiver was nothing but a fiction invented by Bankers to foster the idea that everyone had the chance to save up enough to buy an elephant if they put their backs into it.
Didn't they teach you anything in school, dammit?
The White Fiver sounds like a British Empire version of Zorro :)
Money was like the Kabbala back then, you had to be intiated before you could buy anything.
QuoteMoney was like the Kabbala back then
Cripes, I didn't think Madonna was
that old.
Quote from: the_legendary_shark on 31 July, 2009, 01:53:34 PM
It's all quite straightforward, really:
...
Didn't they teach you anything in school, dammit?
I went to one of these here Amurriken schools which taught us new math, so I know that pie are square when they aren't round.
Buuut, seriously, thanks, guys!
QuoteI went to one of these here Amurriken schools which taught us new math
The kind with ounces and pounds, feet and miles? The kind that's 200 years (and counting) out of date? And you, Sir, appear to have a lithp.
Yeah, because I remember the last time I was in an English pub and had a deciliter of real ale.
Touché, pussycat.
this explains why the chaps at NASA did not need computers,
anyone whom can understand pre decimal coins is already a whizz kid maths wise before they even get to school! :o
And it will all change again if Labour get their way with the Euro.
V
An American lady tourist arriving at Heathrow once asked me, in all seriousness, how many shillings there were in a pound, so I very helpfully explained it all to her until she'd got it down pat. Was it very naughty of me not to mention they'd been abolished some decades earlier?
My excuse is that I was returning from a year at a Midwestern college, where I had had to explain on an almost daily basis that East Berlin wasn't in Russia, that England was attached to Scotland but not to Ireland and that none of them were attached to the rest of Europe, that England consisted of more than foggy-London-plus-a-few-quaint-villages and other strange ideas. People would actually ARGUE these points with me as if I didn't even know where I came from!
I had an American visit a few years back. Before he turned up he asked if the water was safe to drink and could he buy batteries for his little radio. Despite being amazed that you could buy tourist guides to Cuba he didn't realise that it was just off the coast of Florida (I think he thought it was mid-Atlantic).
Lots of fun!
-Bouwel-
I used to drive a mini-bus for an airport service and one day I had but one passenger to bring home, an American in a silly suit with too many bags. He was my only passenger.
It was around 5am on a lovely summer morning as I eased the Transit onto the motorway. The skies were clear and the sun was just risen, clean and fresh in the sky. There was nothing else on the motorway and we must've been traveling for a good couple of minutes before seeing another vehicle, which turned out to be a lorry in a rush. The lorry thundered past, as lorries were wont to do in the days before speed limiters, and the American in the silly suit screamed and grabbed my shoulders. Thinking he was having a heart attack, I slowed and looked for the nearest Hard Shoulder SOS phone.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"That crazy guy just overtook you on the inside!" he wailed.
"This isn't like America, you know," I said, "We don't HAVE to drive on the right if we don't want to. It's all down to personal choice."
"Ah," he said, relaxing somewhat, "I understand."
During the journey home I watched his face in the mirror as it ever so slowly changed from a contented grin to a thunderous scowl as the foolishness of my explanation dawned on him.
He didn't leave a tip.
A White fiver? Isn't that's what GRennie keeps trying to buy beer with?
Quote from: vzzbux on 05 August, 2009, 08:53:02 PM
And it will all change again if Labour get their way with the Euro.
V
MandelSlime is trying to push that one through but i dont think it will happen myself as from what i have heard certain forces within the establishment wont let it happen.
Bloody ridiculous currency - can't think why we kept it so long. Now, seeing as we were SO brave on the day of decimalisation let's go the next step - let's go metric. We've only been teaching it in schools since the 50s. Grasp the nettle, Britons!
GRASP IT!
Otherwise the Rebellion's struggle will have been for nothing if Vader's system is allowed to endure.
Quote from: mikegloady on 06 August, 2009, 07:34:11 PM
Bloody ridiculous currency - can't think why we kept it so long.
Because 12 has more factors than 10 so there are more logical sub-divisions.
We should think ourselves lucky, the rupee used to be base 16.
Base 16? Ker-ist!
Surely the only subdivision we really need is 100? Pounds and pence, that's the way!