It was brought to my attention by a person who wishes to remain nameless (not wanting to be thought an inveterate scanner of obits) that among the death notices in last Sunday’s NY Times is one that begins as follows:
ROTHSTEIN – Miriam Chilson. Died at age 91, on August 14, 2002. She would’ve turned 92 on September 21. Miriam was the wife of the late Irwin Chilson, the late Lou Fineberg, the late Phil Rispler and the latest late Moe Rothstein.
I submit that Miriam must have been quite a gal to have inspired that bit of affectionate wordplay, and that Irwin, Lou, Phil, and Moe were four lucky guys. I wish I’d known her, and I hereby honor her memory.
A $1,000 is also known a G (for Grand), popularized by rappers like Tupac as in the lyric:
“I made a G-today…but you made it in a sleazy way, selling crack to the kids,
Hey I gotta get paid, that’s just the way it is.
Grover Cleveland was on the thousand dollar bill when it was in circulation.
The term “bit” harks back to the Spanish piece-of-eight, which was common currency in the New World prior to the minting and printing of the earliest money in the fledgling America. It was scored, pie-fashion, and could be broken into sections as needed. “Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar…”
Also, this site includes monetary slang of 19th-Century England in its glossary….
Thanks for the site; I fixed your comment so the link works. Just FYI, you can’t put a link between angle brackets — it simply vanishes. You have to either put [a href=”link”]…[/a] between angle brackets (instead of the square brackets I used here), adding /a after the word(s) you want linked, or just give the link plain:
http://tlucretius.net/Sophie/Castle/victorian_slang.html