April 16, 2014 Article

The Old Coot mourns the loss of moola.

By Merlin Lessler

Money has lost its pizzazz! It once added real color to our language. Back when a five-dollar bill was called a “Five-spot” a “Fin” a “Lincoln.” When a quarter was two bits, as in that old jingle, Shave and a haircut: two bits.

Today it’s a bore. You go to an ATM and get a stack of twenties, the one denomination that lacks a colorful past. Probably because it was a rarity back in the colorful money heyday. People had coins in their pocket, a dollar bill, a five, maybe a ten once in a while, but rarely a twenty. The ten was king for the average person. A 10-spot! A sawbuck! It had pizzazz. (Called a sawbuck because the Roman numeral for ten is an X which looks like a sawbuck (an old term for sawhorse). Some big spenders, those fortunate enough to get their hands on a twenty, sometimes called it a double sawbuck since it had no name of its own.

It’s getting worse, our drab money terminology. Moola, scratch, wad, bread, dough, smackers, clams are long gone, as are: 5-spot, 10-spot, c-note, fin, fiver, single, a Washington, a Lincoln.  Even today’s colorless terminology: 5-dollar bill, 10-dollar bill, a twenty, a fifty, is slipping away as plastic money and smart phone Apps replace cash money entirely. No pizzazz in that form of monetary exchange. We’ve lost so much. You can’t brag that you won ten thousand smackers (ten grand) in the lottery! All you are left with is a weak statement about the ten thousand monetary credits that have been electronically transferred to your bank account.

Now, Bitcoin is making its move, an invisible, digital replacement for both real currency and plastic money. The trouble is, a lot of people holding Bitcoins are now holding the bag, an empty one at that. Millions of those Bitcoins have disappeared or lost value and the Internet Company that created them has gone out of business. Kind of makes us old coots who stuff our wads, our dough, our moola, under the mattress look pretty smart But, digital money will persevere, and eventually complete the destruction of the sawbuck, the fin and the c-note.  I’ll bet five smackers on it!