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The flavour of the week past – or the bitter aftertaste, depending on how you see it – is currency. India’s ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes were demonetised and new notes are being fed into the banking system and disbursed. One of these is a ₹2,000 note that is a shade of pink. There’s no saying if it will come to be called a Pinky, but colour is what gave the dollar its nickname of ‘greenback’.
The green was introduced in the mid-19th century to discourage counterfeiting. Counterfeiters would erase the black numerals on the note and reprint it with a higher-denomination numeral. The green ink, invented by a Canadian chemist, was difficult to erase, and as it was not black it could not be photographed. The green colour was on the back of the dollar bill and that’s how it got its name.
Buck is another piece of slang for money, but it began as a nickname for the dollar. Deerskins were used as a unit of trade with Native Americans in the mid-18th century, and the name continued though the practice stopped.
The $100 bill is called a Benjamin, after Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States. It is also called a C-Note, based on the Roman numeral for 100. It is the highest denomination in circulation in the US.
Across the border, the dollar that is Canada’s currency is referred to as a loonie as the C$1 coin carries the image of the common loon, a bird that is familiar to the country. It was introduced in 1987. In 2006 the Royal Canadian Mint secured the rights to the name as it became famous. When the two-dollar coin was introduced in 1996, it was nicknamed the ‘toonie’, a combination of ‘two’ and ‘loonie’. The New Zealand dollar is informally called a kiwi for similar reasons – the coin carries an image of the bird indigenous to the country.
There are nicknames for currency pairs too. The Great Britain Pound-US dollar pair is called the cable. This came from a transatlantic cable laid in 1858, which enabled transmission of currency prices by telegraph from trading desks in London to New York. The GBP-Euro pair is called a chunnel, drawing from the name for the tunnel beneath the English Channel that separates the UK and France.
Compiled by Sravanthi Challapalli
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