Made In America (14 page)

Although the time change had no legal authority – it was
done solely at the behest of the railways – it was introduced almost everywhere, and almost everywhere the event proved to be disappointingly anticlimactic. Millions watched as the hands on their court-house clocks were summarily advanced or moved back a few notches, then pursed their lips and returned to business as it dawned on them that that was as exciting as it was going to get. Here and there local difficulties cropped up. In Washington, a disagreement between the US Attorney General and the head of the Naval Observatory meant that for several years government clocks in the city showed a different time to all others.
³
For the most part, however, America took to uniform timekeeping with barely a flutter and life grew easier because of it.

The fuss over introducing time zones was as nothing compared with the push, half a century later, for
summer time,
or
daylight-saving time
as it quickly came to be called. The driving force behind this idea was a businessman named William Willett, who wanted it primarily so that he would have more daylight to play golf in the evenings. Again the outcries were vociferous. The
New York Times
called it ‘an act of madness' and others seriously suggested that they might equally change thermometers to make summers appear cooler and winters warmer. As one historian has put it, ‘the idea of altering clocks to suit some human whim made daylight saving seem both unnatural and almost monstrous to its many opponents'.
⁴
Although America briefly instituted daylight saving as a way of conserving energy supplies during World War I, such was the antagonism to the idea in some quarters that it wasn't until 1966 that America got universal summer time.

Money, too, was a feature of American life that did not become standardized until relatively late in the day. Until the issuing of the first ‘greenbacks' during the Civil War, the federal government in Washington produced no paper
money, but only coins. Paper money was left to banks. As recently as the first half of the nineteenth century banks – and the word is used loosely to describe some of these institutions – were in the happy position of being able to print their own money. Types of bills proliferated wildly. In Zanesville, Ohio, to take one example, no fewer than thirty banks churned out money under such colourful appellations as the Virginia Saline Bank and the Owl Creek Bank. The bills were often of such dubious value that they were referred to as
shinplasters.
⁵
Some banks' money was more respected than others'. The Citizens' Bank of New Orleans issued a particularly sought-after $10 bill. Because the French word for ten,
dix,
was inscribed on the back they became known as
Dixies.
As a descriptive term for the whole of the South, the word didn't really catch on until Daniel Decatur Emmett, a northerner, wrote the immensely successful song ‘Dixie's Land' (which almost everyone thinks, wrongly, is called ‘Dixie') in 1859.
⁶

With so many types of money floating about, the situation would appear to have been hopelessly confused, but in fact it was a huge improvement on what had gone before. Throughout the long colonial period, the British had allowed very little British specie to circulate in the colonies. Though businesses kept their accounts in pounds, shillings and pence, they had to rely on whatever tender came to hand. A bewildering mixture of home-minted coins and foreign currency – Portuguese
johanneses
(familiarly known as
joes),
Spanish
doubloons
and
pistoles,
French
sous
and
picayunes,
Italian and Flemish
ducatoons,
American
fugios
(so called because the Latin
fugio,
'I fly', was inscribed on one side) and other coins almost without number – circulated throughout the colonies, and business people had to know that 1s. 4d. was equal in value to one-sixth of a milled
peso
(the original ‘piece of eight'), that a Spanish or Mexican
real
was worth twelve and a half cents, that a Portuguese
johannes
traded for
$8.81, that 2s. 3d. was equivalent to half a Dutch
dollar.
Along the eastern seaboard, a
real
was generally called a shilling, but elsewhere it was more racily known as a
bit.
First found in English in 1688,
bit
may be a translation of the Spanish
pieza,
'piece' (which metamorphosed into
peso),
or it may be that the early coins were literally bits broken from larger silver coins. Because a bit was worth twelve and a half cents, a quarter dollar naturally became known as
two bits,
a half dollar
as four bits,
particularly west of the Mississippi. Ten cents was a
short bit;
a
long bit
was fifteen cents. Even after America began minting its own coins, foreign coins remained such an integral part of American commerce that they weren't withdrawn from circulation until 1857.

To add to the confusion, values varied from place to place. In Pennsylvania and Virginia, a
half-real
went by the alternative name
fipenny bit
or
fip
because it was equivalent in worth to an English five-penny piece. But in New York it was worth sixpence and in New England fourpence halfpenny. It is something of a wonder that any business got done at all – and even more wondrous when you consider that until after the Revolution there wasn't a single bank in America. Philadelphia got the first, in 1781; Boston and New York followed three years later.
⁷

Not surprisingly, perhaps, many people dispensed with money and relied instead on barter, or
country pay
as it was often called. The goods used in barter were known as
truck
(from the Old French
troquer,
meaning to
peddle
or
trade),
a sense preserved in the expression
to have no truck with
and in
truck farm,
neither of which has anything to do with large wheeled vehicles. (In the vehicular sense,
truck
comes from the Latin
trochus,
'wheel'.)

The decimalized monetary system based on dollars and cents was devised by Gouverneur Morris as assistant to the superintendent of finances, in consultation with Thomas Jefferson, and adopted in 1784 against the protests of
bankers and businessmen, most of whom wanted to preserve English units and terms such as pounds and shillings. The names given to the earliest coins were something of an etymological rag-bag. In ascending order they were:
mill, cent, dime, dollar
and
eagle. Dollar
comes ultimately from
Joachimstaler,
a coin that was first made in the Bohemian town of Joachimstal in 1519 and then spread through Europe as
daler, thaler
and
taler.
In an American context
dollar
is first recorded in 1683.
⁸
Dime,
or
disme
as it was spelled on the first coins, is a corruption of the French
dixième,
and was intended to be pronounced ‘deem', though it appears that hardly anyone did. The word is not strictly an Americanism.
Dime
had been used occasionally in Britain as far back as 1377, though it had fallen out of use there long before, no doubt because in a non-decimal currency there was no use for a term meaning one-tenth.
Cent
of course comes from the Latin
centum,
'one hundred', and was rather an odd choice of term because initially there were two hundred cents to a dollar.
⁹
The custom of referring to a single cent as a
penny
is a linguistic hold-over from the days of British control. No American coin has ever actually been called a penny. (The term appears to come from the Latin
pannus,
'a piece of cloth', and dates from a time when cloth was sometimes used as a medium of exchange.)

A notable absentee from the list of early American coins is
nickel.
There was a coin worth five cents but it was called a
half dime
or
jitney,
from the French
jeton,
signifying a small coin or a token. When early in this century American cities began to fill with buses that charged a five-cent fare,
jitney
fell out of use for the coin and attached itself instead to the vehicles.
Nickel
didn't become synonymous with the five-cent piece until 1875; before that
nickel
signified either a one-cent or three-cent piece. The phrase ‘don't take any wooden nickels' dates only from 1915 – and, no, there never was a time when wooden nickels circulated. Such a coin would have been
immediately recognizable as counterfeit and in any case would have cost more to manufacture than it was worth.

One of the more durable controversies in the world of numismatics is where the dollar sign comes from. The first use of $ in an American context is in 1784 in a memorandum from Thomas Jefferson suggesting the dollar as the primary unit of currency, and some have deduced from this that he made it up there and then, either as a monogram based on his own initials (improbable; he was not that vain) or as a kind of doodle (equally improbable; he was not that unsystematic). A more widely held notion is that it originated as the letters
U
and
S
superimposed on each other and that the
U
eventually disintegrated into unconnected parallel lines. The problem with this theory is that $ as a symbol for
peso
far outdates its application to US dollars. (It is still widely used as a peso sign throughout Latin America.) The most likely explanation is that it is a modified form of the pillars of Hercules, wrapped around with a scroll, to be found on old Spanish pieces of eight.

Many slang terms and other like expressions associated with money date from the nineteenth century. Americans have been describing money as
beans
(as in ‘I haven't got a bean') since 1810 and as
dough
since at least 1851, when it was first recorded in the
Yale Tomahawk. Small change
has been around since 1819,
not worth a cent
since the early 1820s, and
not worth a red cent
since 1839.
Upper crust
dates from 1832,
easy money
from 1836,
C-note
(short for
century note)
for a $100 bill from 1839,
flat broke
and
dead broke
from the 1840s. Americans have been referring to a dollar as a
buck
since 1856 (it comes from
buckskin,
an early unit of exchange).
Sound as a dollar, bet your bottom dollar, strike it rich, penny-ante
and
spondulicks
or
spondulix
(a term of wholly mysterious origin) all date from the 1850s. A $10 bill has been a
sawbuck
since the early 1860s. It was so called because the original bills had a roman numeral X on them, which
brought to mind a saw-horse, or sawbuck.
Mazuma,
from a Yiddish slang term for money, dates from 1880, and
simoleon,
another word of uncertain provenance, meaning $1, dates from 1881.

But it wasn't just money terms that America developed in the nineteenth century. A flood, a positive torrent, of words and expressions of all types came out of the country in the period. The following is no more than a bare sampling:
to make the fur fly
(1804);
quick on the trigger
and
to whitewash
(1808);
having an ax to grind
(1811);
keep a stiff upper lip
(yes, it's an Americanism, 1815);
no two ways about it
(1818);
fly off the handle
(1825);
to move like greased lightning
(1826);
to have a knockdown and dragout fight
(1827);
to sit on the fence
and
to go the whole hog
(1828);
firecracker, hornswoggle, non-committal
and
to be in cahoots with
(1829);
ornery
and
talk turkey
(1830);
horse sense and nip and tuck
(often originally
rip
and
tuck;
no one knows why; 1832.);
conniption fit barking up the wrong tree
and
to keep one's eyes peeled
(1833);
close shave
and
rip-roaring
(1834);
hell-bent
(1835);
stool pigeon
(1836);
to have a chip on one's shoulder
and
to raise Cain
(1840);
to scoot
(1841);
to pull the wool over one's eyes
and
to get hitched,
in the sense of being married (1842);
hold your horses
(1844);
beeline
(1845);
to stub one's toe
(1846);
to be a goner
(1847);
to back down, to dicker, by the great horn spoon
and
highfalutin
(1848);
to face the music
(1850);
to paddle one's own canoe
and
to keep one's shirt on
(1854);
one-horse town
(1855);
to knock the spots off
and
stag party
(1856);
neither hide nor hair
(1857);
deadbeat
(1863);
to knuckle down
(1864);
to go haywire
(1865);
con man
and
to slather
(1866);
to go back on,
as with a promise (1868);
to get in on the ground floor
(1872);
to eat crow
(1877);
underdog
(1887);
cagey
in the sense of shrewd (1893); and
panhandler
and
to be out on a limb
(1897).

In addition, there were scores more that have since fallen out of use:
ground and lofty
(once a very common synonym for
fine and dandy), happify, to missionate, to consociate
(that is,
to come together in an assembly),
dunderment
(bewilderment),
puckerstoppled
(to be embarrassed),
from Dan to Beersheba.
This last, alluding to the northernmost and southernmost outposts of the Holy Land, was in daily use for at least two hundred years as a synonym for
wide-ranging, from A to Z,
but dropped from view in the nineteenth century and hasn't been seen much since.