Well that’s not good. Looks like all the “Global Warming” we’ve had has not been enough to prevent a freeze in France threatening the wine production. Good news for California and Australian wines I guess…
Apr 8, 2021,03:29pm EDT|1,183 views
French Vineyards ‘Ablaze’ Across France: The Fight To Save Crops
Alex Ledsom
Alex LedsomSenior Contributor
Travel
I write about travel, culture, food & drink.France is under a cold spell, with the weather falling to an unexpected -4C across large parts of the country, record lows for April. And that’s causing huge problems for farmers and wine producers, who fear that crops will be damaged. From Chablis to Champagne, as reported by The Local, France has been covered with images of what looks like fields that have been set alight.
Smudge Pots… whole vineyards full of pots of fire. I suppose in a couple of years we will have wine snobs reporting on the “smokey notes of rustic campfires” and “sweetness tinged with the bite of fire”…
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56688031
Save our wine! Big freeze spells disaster for French vineyards
The images are captivating, but across France farmers are counting the cost after three nights of sub-zero temperatures. For many winemakers the 2021 harvest is ruined.
Temperatures have dipped to record lows in some areas, and farmers have used every method they can to save their crops. Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie says he will declare an agricultural disaster.
[…]
“It’s a national phenomenon,” warned Jérôme Despey, head of the FNSEA farmers’ union, who said these frosts were worse than any he could remember.Winemaker Boris Calmette, 62, spoke of a catastrophe: “We’ve got wine co-operatives affected by as much as 90%, which is extremely rare.”
Yeah, ’cause you know, constantly rising temperatures pushing us to a fiery doom always make for record cold spells… /sarc;
So I’m guessing that when it comes to wine, the French are saying to forget about “Carbon Footprint” and other follies. Spectacular images of acres and acres of hectares of fires in amongst the grapes…
All 65 wine areas of Bordeaux have been hit by temperatures as low as -5C and wine-growers have lit braziers and candles a few feet apart in an attempt to protect their crops. Another tactic is to burn bales of straw.
In the Sauternes region of Bordeaux, some vineyards have reported 90% of the crop destroyed.
Sad to see it. OTOH there are other years and other places, so no wine shortage in our future. OTOH, if this becomes a regular thing, maybe France will realize the folly of the Global Warming Chicken Littles…
Musings from the Chiefio 
Short term. It will hit the (superior) Cali wines soon.
The problem is, fake science will always reveal itself.
And in the land of fire and flooding rains that, according to Climate Commissar Tim Flannery was supposed to run out of water long before now, this year we have the floods and last year there were the fires.
Frost in Bordeaux wiped out lots of vines in 1945 and 1961.
The inter-annual variation in weather has always been much greater than the variation in the ten, twenty, fifty or hundred year average.
With more CO2 in the air this arid land is thriving like never before, even in the drier years. So, there is more to burn. And we have better tools to stop the burning. So, to the extent to which we succeed in stopping the fire, the mass of stuff that will burn grows apace. Without regular mitigation disaster by fire is inevitable.
@earl happ: The rate of growth of everything after last year’s long wet winter is phenomenal at our place in Victoria. All the clearing we did over the winter has been more than replaced. :( CO2, rain and sun…way to go! There was a good grape crop (not to mention wasp crop!) and a massive crop of apples. The pears looked good but most are rotting from within. These are home crops, not commercial scale.
@Phil:
California ranges from hottest desert to glacier topped mountains and all points in between. IF it gets too cold for Northern Coastal, then Central Inland will be a year to remember. There’s always some place that’s just right every year.
Plus coastal doesn’t change much year to year. Inland more so. Central Coast never seems to get a freeze. Stayed in an apartment in L.A. coastal area once. The heater (if you can call it that) was about a 1 kW electric element in a wall fixture about a foot square… It looked like it had never been used….
Now I can see Washington State or Oregon having freeze issues… They were considered too cold for good wine in the ’60s… Then did “German Style Whites”. Now, with special tending, can pull off some pretty good reds in a few areas. Turn that back a little bit and it’s a no-go…
@Annie:
We’ve got some kind of worm that gets into the Japanese Pear Apples. Not all, just some. But I can’t bring myself to spray…
@Earl:
My “garden” has turned into a jungle over winter… Things are just growing like crazy. Even have 2 Lima bean plants that are sprouting for a second year! I’ll need a weed wacker to get it down enough to mow…
French wine, meh. Good wine has a simple recipe – lots of sunshine. Buy stuff from sunniest places (southern Italy, Spain, Portugal, Australia, California, Chile), and it will mostly be good. French is sometimes good, but a lot is hit and miss.
These events usually involve temperature inversions – – warmer air above – colder air below.
Years ago in in the USA, vineyard and orchards had “smudge pots” or bales of old hay or straw, the latter would get doused with a quart (?) of carbon base liquid fuel. When a freeze threatened hundreds of such would be fired and the air would move. Not pretty, nor did it smell nice.
Propellers on towers have replaced burning, although the engines (many converted standard V8s) use a fuel also. More sound is generated, less smell.
An Australian grower would have a helicopter fly forth-n-back over his vines to accomplish the same get-the-air-moving thing.
Below is a comment from a grower I know:
“One of the pictures, the one from twitter that almost looks like snow is clearly from the winter at some point as the vines aren’t pruned which they surely would be if they were getting enough growth to be frosted. We have buds swelling but nothing out yet so the cold of the last few nights was unimportant.
But that means French wine prices will rise which they already have thanks to Trump tariffs. In some ways that’s OK for us but there are many small importers all over the country that were already struggling because of the tariffs – I don’t know if Biden has reversed that or not.“
I consider myself pretty good with Roman numerals. We were on a trip through various places in France, and they asked us what date the Roman numerals stood for on some old church doorway. I answered first—it was 1500 something. I enjoy reading the copyright dates on various shows. I was watching an Alfred Hitchcock TV show and the copyright was: MCMLVIX. It’s nonsense. They wanted 1959. That would be: MCMLIX. Assuming standard Roman numeral procedure, the number they had would be 1954. But it isn’t formed correctly.
Jim
Now I wonder what they burn in those smokey pots? windelectricity, perhaps. not a cheep from the green wine slurping luvvies. Let Nature takes its Course.
@Jim Masterson – Roman numerals? That goes a ways towards explaining the Fall of The Roman Empire. Did you ever try multiplying or dividing using Roman numerals?
Cleopatra my asp!
😜 🤣🤣
It’s still early-enough in the year for the secondary buds to develop and thus the vines may not be as badly-damaged as it currently appears. Production may be a bit down, though, and the effectively-shorter growing season will likely mean less sugar in the grapes. Might well be a vintage year for Cognac and Armagnac (lower sugars means more-concentrated flavour in the final spirits). On the other hand, there’s a whole lot of wine-lake still around, and thus likely no global shortage.
Whereas with annual plants, if they don’t produce flowers and seeds this year they’ll die out and thus they’ll tend to be resistant against late frosts (or wait until there’s no chance of such things happening before flowering), vines last easily 80 years and possibly well over a century, so there’s not the same problem of needing to produce fruit and seeds every year without fail. However, each bud has a backup that can grow if the vine needs it (for example, if the first bud’s growth is knocked off by wind or bad handling, since initially it’s pretty fragile).
The smoke pots used are simply to produce smoke that reflects the LWIR back down again and reduces the probability of the young leaves and flowers freezing. Much the same can be done using water-spray, and this stops the shoots getting far-enough below zero centigrade to actually get ice in the tissues and damage the shoots. Smoke blows away pretty easily, after all, but the water settles on the shoots and protects them providing you keep adding it for long-enough that there remains some liquid water on the surface.
Round here, though I’m only a couple of hours a bit South of East from Bordeaux, no real frosts and no obvious damage.
@Jim Masterson:
And here i thought I was the only one who did that! (Figure out the copyright date in old movies).
Keeps the skill around…
@H.R.:
Yes, I have, but fairly long ago.
There’s equally silly things we do today and will be laughed at in some future time. Take electricity. We have the sign wrong. The charge carrier is the electron so ought to be positive, but isn’t. The entire field is polluted with inverted charge, but we just ignore it and move on…
@H.R.
To answer your question, yes, I have tried to multiply Roman numerals. It is a real pain to keep all the partial products correct and then to add them. No, I have not tried to divide Roman numerals. I find designing digital circuits to multiply and divide binary numbers difficult enough.
Here is a relief on the temple wall at Kom Ombo.
The lady on the far left is Cleopatra IV (see how I sneaked in those Roman numeral things). The guy to her right is her husband, Ptolemy IX, but I’m not sure of the number. Cleopatra IV would be the great grandmother of Cleopatra VII. The seventh was the lady who screwed around with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony (literally), and was played by Elizabeth Taylor in the movie.
This is a closeup of Cleopatra’s cartouche
And if you need help translating, here is a cheat sheet
The nose symbol at the top is a Q sound (not K or C). The lion is the L-E sound. The lotus symbol is the O sound. So it’s saying QLEO or CLEO.
The bird is an A sound. I don’t remember how it fits in. Incidentally, the birds and lion are pointing towards the right. That means you are supposed to read these hieroglyphics from top-down and left-to-right. If the animals were pointing in the opposite direction, then you read from right-to-left. In some temples, you’ll see columns where they all point in one direction and then next to them, more columns where they point in the opposite direction.
The square is a house symbol with the Pah sound. The hand is the D sound. So Cleopatra’s cartouche is really saying Cleo-pa-dra.
Jim
@ Jim M. – Hey, thanks for the additional scoop on the Egyptian writings. Nice little lesson there.
In 5th or 6th grade, we learned base 2, 6, 8, & 12 arithmetic and at some other time, had a day or two of the math hour devoted to Roman numerals.
Multiply and divide? The teacher didn’t want to go there. After having us do some addition and subtraction exercises, well that was enough for all involved and we moved on.
I’m impressed that you’ve tried multiplying Roman numerals. Are you downplaying the mess that it is just to suck me into trying it? 😜
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@E.M. – So you did it too? When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
Oh wait…. even they don’t do their math in Roman numerals.
I rest my case. Rome fell because no one could multiply or divide anything. 😜 😊
P.S. – For fun, someone should make a handheld calculator that’s in Roman numerals; keys and display. I’d buy one and just wait for someone to say, “Can I borrow your calculator for a minute?”
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Hmmmmm…. I’ll bet there’s one online and a phone ap you can download to turn your phone into a Roman numeral calculator. I’m head over to search for one now.
Yup. Here’s one and there is also an ap for a smartphone, too
https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/conversions/roman-numeral-calculator.php
Someone had w-a-a-a-y too much time on their hands one day. I’m going to bookmark that calculator. There’s gotta be some fun to be had in there somewhere.
Oops! Forgot the cite.
Furey, Edward “Roman Numeral Calculator”; CalculatorSoup, https://www.calculatorsoup.com – Online Calculators
Edward Furey deserves the props, that’s for sure.
Does it come with a hammer and mason’s chisel?
Readers who enjoy the challenge of translating Roman numerals to decimal-base numbers might be intellectually entertained by the far less widespread knowledge that the standardized Roman-numeral letters ‘L’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘M’ were originally not letters at all. Instead, they were derived from these glyphs:
• ‘ↆ’, for which the leftmost stroke was abandoned and represented by ‘L’; and
• ‘ↀ’, which came to be visually opened at the bottom (I imagine that glyph as a MUFI F11A ‘capital letter uncial M’, which is accessible in their ‘Private-Use Area’-51 [♢], but for the interim, looks much like a Unicode ‘capital‘Ȝ’ rotated 90° c.c.w. [×]), then eventually represented by ‘M’. Meanwhile, the original glyph’s 2 sides were separated into 2 glyphs, the larger numbr being granted the vertical stroke, the pair eventually represented by the familiar ‘C’ and ‘D’.
Only the eventual ‘C’, and ‘M’ could be plausibly explained as acrophonic uses of centum and mīlle. ‘I’, ‘V’, ‘X’, ‘L’, and ‘D’ are nowhere close to ūn·us, -a, um, quīnque, decem, quīnquāgintā, and quīngentī, respectively.
Some especially analytical readers probably noticed that the nonacrophonic original glyphs were composed as 1 stroke, 2 strokes connected at the bottom, 2 strokes connected at the middle, and 3 strokes connected at the bottom (thus a middle stroke added to a ‘V’).
I recall from extensive browsing in a book whose identity I’ve forgotten, possibly because I couldn’t have afforded to buy when I encountered it, the Babylonian numeric sysmbols also showed a progression in the number & arrangement of strokes. Seems logical to me.
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Note × : I coulda sworn that Unicode had assigned a code to ‘capital letter uncial M’, but I failed to find it with 2 admittedly cursory checks today.
Note ♢ : So to fall back, the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative: https://mufi.info/m.php?p=mufi. The aforementioned ‘Private-Use Area’-51: https://mufi.info/m.php?p=mufichars&i=3&v=83.
Bordeaux frosts
1945
1956 this was the coldest year in Bordeaux since 1709 — the frost was so severe that huge
swathes of vines died out completely and had to be replanted.
1977 where frost hit on both March 31 and April 9. Bordeaux production was 40% down on 2016,
and 33 per cent lower than the long-term average
1991
1997
2003
2017 these were the worst frosts in living memory, and worse than the frosts of 1945, 1977 and 1991.
2021
I understood that Romans used a sand table (a sort of early abacus) for multiplication.
Now I am worried. The French can no longer decipher Roman numerals? (as far as I know, every movie still has the Roman numeral date, but I have not checked the latest).
The problem with Roman numerals is they had no zero! And the second problem was when you get to big numbers they had no scientific notation! But other than that, they work For Superbowls, and movies and road markers! Oi Vey!
Just for grins, here’s a picture of the arch to one of the many entrances into the Colosseum. This entrance is obviously to section 52.
The gouges are due to people stealing the bronze clamps during Medieval times. The Pope saved the Colosseum for the most part by consecrating it as a church.
Jim
@H.R.
In my day, it was base 5 and maybe base 9 or 3. That was mostly useless, except for the idea of working with different bases.
I realize that 6 is a perfect number and 12 is an abundant number, but I don’t see why they went with those. It’s been suggested that we switch from base 10 to base 12, but I doubt it will ever happen.
Base 2 and 8 I understand—computers. There’s also base 16. Base 4 relates to DNA and RNA codes.
Jim
A national phenomenon… better get used to it. 2023-2025 might be a real wake up call.
@Jim Masterson – I distinctly remember we learned base 2, 6, & 8 and base 12 had us messed up a bit because we needed two more symbols. Things kind of fell apart when we got to base 12.
I’d say a good half of the class, maybe more, got the hang of 2, 6, & 8. Maybe It’s because when you’re that young, you’re not locked into Base 10 just yet.
That entryway is a hoot. It makes me wonder what their reserved seat tickets looked like. 😁
I have no clue why you got base 5 and maybe 3 or 9 when we got 2, 6, 8 & 12. Maybe 5, being half of 10 was easier to use to teach the concept of different bases? And 9 and 3 have a lot of common factors. So why did we get 2, 6, & 8? I dunno. We only spent a few days on the topic, maybe a week, just to give us the idea, and then we moved on.
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@Compu Gator – You’ve posted enough that we’re well aware of your interest in languages and etymology.
Now and then, the topic comes up here that maybe the ancients were far more technologically advanced than we think (there’s some sort of negative ‘ism’ for that, I suppose).
That was a very interesting bit about the Sumerian writing and how elements of the physical shape seem to have carried into Roman times. But of course, the shapes should convey some meaning. Doh! We’re not that smart nowadays.
I ran across some other reference to the shape of symbols logically conveying hints to their meaning, but I don’t have the level of interest you have. I have long since forgotten which language and which symbols were involved, but what has always stuck with me is how knowledgeable and clever the ancients were about things the we are smugly rediscovering now. Some tech and science stuff was known thousands of years ago and was lost, maybe more than once.
I keep looking for cell phone fossils. Why do I think Tyrannosaurus Rex had such tiny arms and claws? To work their little cell phones, of course, and hold them close so they could see the little screens. You know how tiny those buttons are. 😜😜 (Definitely needed two winkies for that).
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@All – Blame Jim Masterson. I think he started it 🤣🤣🤣
Fun stuff.
@EMS – Re: coast not getting cold.
never say never. Back in 68 and 69, I was living in Oceanside. It snowed that winter! So it does sometimes, just not very often,
@H.R.:
When you know you will be carving symbols in stone by hand you put more think time into compact symbols with deep meaning ;-)
I started to learn hieroglyphics once, then read some translations of their texts and realized 2 things:
1) It wasn’t very interesting. Accounting. Religion mumbo-jumbo. Historical mythology about Great Dear Leader.
2) It was complicated, cumbersome, and crude.
Did like the notion of boustrophedon or as a cow ploughs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
Write one letter series left to right the next row
tfel ot thgir
Saves all that time walking back across the temple to start the next line… and yes, the way the symbols face reverses on each row.
Bases:
Hex or base 16 is really useful in 16 bit computers and networking. Base 64 is slowly catching on for data transfers and would work well with 32 bit and 64 bit computers.
https://base64.guru/
Basically take base 16 and extend to end of lower case letters then add uppercase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64
Note that symbols used for 62 and 63 vary….
Personally I’m fond of base 60. Lots of common factors so easy division. Why we have a 60 minute clock and 360 degree maps.
@EM
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Personally I’m fond of base 60. Lots of common factors so easy division. Why we have a 60 minute clock and 360 degree maps.
<<
And I thought it was because we inherited the base 60 system for time and angles from the Babylonians.
Jim
Speaking of base-60 systems . . .
If you take a right triangle and set the length of one leg to an Astronomical Unit (the average distance of the Earth from the Sun) and set the angle opposite to 1 second of arc, then the side adjacent is about 3.26 light-years or 1 parsec. It’s the definition of a parsec.
The fact that time and angles both use minutes and seconds confuses some people, like George Lucas.
For instance, here’s some dialogue from Star Wars–A New Hope:
Obi-Wan Kenobi: Yes, indeed, if it’s a fast ship.
Han Solo: Fast ship? You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon?
Obi-Wan Kenobi: Should I have?
Han Solo: It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs. I’ve outrun Imperial starships. Not the local bulk cruisers, mind you. I’m talking about the big Corellian ships now. She’s fast enough for you old man.
Despite all the nonsense since about trying to claim Han Solo was talking about finding shortcuts, here he’s clearly talking about “speed” and not distance.
Jim
@Jim Masterson:
When the French foisted Metric on us (and dumped the base 12 / 36 numbers of measuring in feet and yards, note that 1/10 inch gives a 360 yard…) they also attempted to push a base 10 TIME system. If failed because “a quarter till” is hard to do… as are most other divisions… and a 10 hour day has hours that are just too big.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time
yes, we got base 60 time from the Sumerians, but why did they have it? Many common factors and easy division.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Mesopotamian_units_of_measurement
Note that when the Meter was ‘accidentally’ mis-calculated it came out rather close to the old Sumerian unit as did the kilo… I suspect someone was a student of Sumer…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_mathematics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_cuneiform_numerals
It all comes down to your choice of using FRACTIONS or DECIMAL math. For decimal math, a base 10 (or other base with a radix point) works fine and it is great in calculators. For “Human Math” it is vastly easier and faster to “reduce fractions” and then solve. This is now becoming a lost art. But WHY divide by Pi and then multiply some result by Pi if you can just strike both the Pi elements as one is above and the other below?
Similarly the use of various fractions for Pi to let you do easier striking off of common factors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi
Also folks have used other fractions. 25/8 38/13 (16/9)^2 339/108 223/71 142/45
So depending on what precision you needed, and what other “factor” was on the other side of the line, you could use various fractions to make the math a lot easier.
Got something that’s 13 x 7 x Pi /19? Make that 13 x 7 x 19 x 2 / (13 x 19) and it reduces to: 7 x 2 = 14.
Now do that as decimals:
13 x 7 x 3.141592653589 / 19. I’ll wait while you use your pencil (no calculators, remember?…)
With base 60 you have a whole lot more factors you can strike…
FWIW, I learned this in 5th grade from Mr. Heart. A very good teacher with a since of history and love of math. Stuck with me… It is from that point that I measure my love of math. IIRC part of the lesson was about Newton not being keen on the new “decimal math” for the precise reason that it was much harder to do the figures than if you used proper fractions…
Sorry, I like base 16 as it is the basis of computing (byte me). 64 is just 16×4. I am not into the off bases (3, 6, 9 the goose drank wine, and the monkey crashed the street car line). Besides, base 64 has a bigger issue. 10 numerals plus 26 x 2 letters = 62. Magic symbols for the other representations.
I do base 2 in my sleep. base 16 has some interesting aspects. Beyond that, as Khan said, I grow fatigued.
@Phil
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I do base 2 in my sleep.
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When I do math/programming while trying to sleep, I can't get to sleep. Sometimes I think of a solution to a problem, and then I have get up to work on it. It definitely cuts into my sleep time. It's a good thing I'm retired.
Jim
@Jim – not retired, but sleep only a few hours a night, so I fully understand,
In Rem I do base 16. In twilight sleep I do base 2
Not “magic” (which has special meaning in computing too…) but special char. IIRC + and / are the more common for 63 and 64; though I personally would avoid a math operator like + and be more likely to use something like } and { that are not part of standard math notation to my knowledge. Though now, in the age of Unicode, almost any of 10’s of thousands of symbols could be used.
Also note that European Keyboards have all sorts of other letters built in like ñ and then Russian has a 33 modern letters and a whole lot more if you just roll back the clock a little, so you can do it all in Cyrillic just with letters and capitals…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet
Includes another 4 eliminated in 1918…
It isn’t at all hard to come up with 2 more characters …
I’m watching Alfred Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief.” So John Robie is innocent. And Bertani, Foussard, and Foussard’s daughter, Danielle, know this because they are the ones who are committing the crimes. Typical leftest, liberal attitude—blame the innocent for what you are doing. Plus, your liberal position means you are not guilty while your conservative enemies are guilty. Even Alfred Hitchcock knew how these criminals operate.
Jim
A GREAT movie!
@EMS – Yes,and Die Deutscher ü. Still, that is just over complicating what is basically simple. Binary math is easy. Hex is easy. 64 is just over complicating. YMMV
A couple of days before this French tragedy, Italy lost a good percentage of its summer fruits and grapes for the same reason.
If it had to be the result of a heatwave the hypocrites would be all up in arms shouting catastrophic climate change, global warming, kill all sceptics.
@Maltesertoo – I like the English (vs. American) spelling of Skeptics/Sceptics. It reminds me of shaving nicks! :-)
Hmmm…. @Phil: I never thought about why, but I swap between the two spellings from time to time. Thinking about it, American Dad / English Mum… of course I’d use some of each…
@Malteseertoo:
Italy, eh? I didn’t see that one. I’ll need to look into it.
Yup… Looks like Italian Wine taking a hit too:
https://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/frost-strikes-european-vineyards
I predict riots and the fall of governments in France and Italy. That many people and a shortage of wine? It just can not be sustained… Though I suppose they can still import some… or take up beer drinking like the British did when the Little Ice Age made grape growing risky business and failure prone….
As many before me have said, the English speaking world is separated by a common language.
They giving up drinking wine? Imitating the Brits? ROFL!!!
That is the best joke I have heard this year! And with Blindspot as Resident in Chief, that took a lot to do.
@philjourdan – For shaving nicks, of course, you need a styptic rather than a sceptic!
A Greek-speaking friend once told me he was always amused when he heard English-speaking academic types uttering the word “logos” (Greek for “word”, as used in ‘In the beginning was the Word”). They always pronounce it “low-goss”. But in the Greek the first letter we transcribe as “o” is an omicron (short O), the second an omega (long O). It should be “log-ose” (the final S being a hissy S, not a buzzy Z sound). Language is fun!
Base-64 would have worked better with the English alphabet if we hadn’t stripped out thorn, ash and so on. If we’d kept just one of them …
Per bases, like you I grew up with the Imperial units with their various bases, but also had the advantage of British pounds, shillings and pence to pay for the Imperial quantities with.. A 7″ single, in my teens, cost 6/8d, so three of them would cost you £1/- (a “quid”). Even the farthing (1/4 of 1d) lasted into my childhood, and at the time there were $4 to £1 – the “half crown” (2/6d) was often called “half a dollar” informally. 5/- would be “five bob”, 1/2d was a “ha’penny” (“hay”…), add a penny for “three ha’pence”, 2d was “tuppence”, 6d a “tanner”, so a 10/6d hat for your tea party would cost you “ten an’ a tanner”. The wealthy used to flaunt it by paying in guineas (21/-) rather than pounds (20/-) Now? It’s all (some number) “pee”, yeugh.
Oh, and on topic, I shan’t miss the French wine. I prefer the Russian spirit!
@Steve C – Way back in the Medieval Period, when I was in grade school and they still taught Geography, we had a couple of hours on the British monetary system, French and Swiss francs, centimes, and Japanese Yen; maybe one or two others, maybe Lira? Marks? Oh, Pesos and ‘pieces of eight’ for sure.
The lessons (4th grade!) were a) there were different systems, not just our pennies, nickels, and dimes b) exchange rates; I think we just did dollars & Pounds, dollars and Francs, Dollars and Yen, dollars and Pesos. That was enough.
We were quite amused by the pounds, farthings, pennies, guineas, and shillings, and we were suitably confused because they just did not corelate to our dollars and our coinage.
It was real simple stuff geared for 4th grade kids, but they used to teach that.
I’d dare say that if you told most people under 30 in the U.S. that something was “not worth a brass farthing” they would have no clue that you were even referring to a British coin. Yet U.S. kids in the ’50s, ’60s, and just maybe in the ’70s would gather what that expression meant; that it was the equivalent of our “not worth a wooden nickel.”
Or a plugged nickel ;p as that was the expression this Southern child of the 50s heard growing up.
@Steve C:
I have a minor collection of British coins from before the conversion, and when still in Mum’s lap was learning to do pounds, shillings, and pence. Fond memories ;-)
And yes, I have a few farthings. Plus some of those giant sized pennies… I always liked the farthing…
Yes, I have an old biscuit tin containing Old British coins, a few ceremonial mintings and “foreigners” that have turned up in change :-) The finest are probably a couple of George III “tuppenny cartwheels”, an inch and five eighths across and nearly a quarter of an inch thick – they weigh a couple of ounces each and cleaning one reveled a metal looking like pretty pure copper.
More fun are a couple of “evasion halfpennies”, used to evade the Draconian counterfeit and treason laws current in the mid-18th century. Rather than attempting to make a proper copy of official coinage, these would, e.g., have a head of Alfred the Great, or just declare that “George II rules” (the two I’ve got) … anything just as long as they clearly weren’t counterfeits of real coins. Because that would make you a traitor and, soon, a dead traitor. They’re very well used, so people must’ve reckoned any copper coin of the right size as being worth just as much as a legit one.
And a silver dollar, 1921, sent across the pond to his brother by my great uncle in Wyoming. Rather more than a modern dollar’s worth of coin silver there!
@HR – Re:
Yea, I was taught in the same period. when there was only one right answer and it was not racist. Today? I am glad I will not be around when these idiots start designing bridges. God help the human race (the only race that matters).
@Steven C – I am a numismatist. And am old enough to have some original silver coins. But my greatest haul was when I lived in Germany in the early 70s. Apparently some of these folks were breaking their parents piggy bank! I ALMOST got a $20 gold certificate (but the cashier who took it decided she would keep it – she was my source for many silver certificates).
I just opened a safe deposit box. MOved most of the stuff there. Fortunately, when we were robbed by a junkie, they missed that stuff. Probably because it was in with my Train stuff. Guess not a big market for N-Gauge trains.
I emigrated to the US as a 15 year old, from Austria, having learned British coinage in school.
On our transatlantic trip, I wanted to learn the mystery of the DIME.
I thought maybe it was like the pieces of eight, 12 1/2 cents. ( no dictionary could be found that mentioned). If you inspect the dime, there is no clue of 10 cents.
I went to the ship store, bought a MickeyMouse comic book for 10 cents and waited for my change, I had never seen a US halfpence. The lady told me no change was coming.
Many years later a German girlfriend asked me about the lyrics of Blue Bayou:
„Saving nickel, saving dimes“…..what‘s a dime?
@Tucsonaustrian
Sorry a dime is ten cents. I have never researched the origin of the name. But from the inception of the country of the USA, all money has been decimal based (they went the Spanish route with coinage and divisions, NOT the English route).
We call a cent a “Penny” which is stolen from the Brits. But a cent is Latin for 1/100. Which technically is what our pennies are. Cents. Nickles are named after the material they were originally made from.
Dime is derived from Disme,which is pronounced dime. And from the Latin which means 1/10.
English is a Borg language.
English coinage correpondence forgot the Three penny (Thrupp’ny) bit. A heavy brass 8-sided coin, thicker than most of the other coins, that lent a certain weight (and wear) to a small boy’s pocket!
@Russ Wood:
Oh Gawd! I remember handling one of those many decades back! I think Mum brought it back from her trip over… Wonder where it went…
@Wine:
FWIW the local Bargain Market had French and Italian wines still on sale cheep. Bought a nice French rosé for $3 and an Italian Pino Grigio for $4. Seems that there’s still a bit of “wine lake” to soak up. ;-)