"I have never seen the colour of Mr. Baskett's money," the Scottish political pamphleteer Thomas Gordon wrote in his 1718 Cordial for Low Spirits. The "colour" sought was gold, or at least good silver, called white money, as against metal of baser quality, easily tarnished, called black money (which may be the source of "blackmail").
Then came the Civil War in the US, with its shortage of metal for coins and distrust of currency issued by local banks. Lincoln's treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, took a chance on issuing "Legal Tender Notes" with green designs on their backs that turned out to be an ingenious way for the government to borrow from the people without paying interest.
Not everyone liked the paper: "The merchant offers greenbacks," The Cincinnati Gazette reported General Lew Wallace's telling an audience early in August 1862, "and Mr. Planter says, `No, Sir, they ain't good here: I must have gold.'"
But the convenient, easy-to-carry greenbacks caught on, leading to the formation of the short-lived Greenback Party a generation later.
The "long green," originally a Pennsylvania term for cheap whiskey, was soon applied to these green-backed notes of large denomination. "There did be long green shtickin' out iv vest pockets," Finley Peter Dunne wrote in his Mr. Dooley series in 1893, "an' men'd drink nawthin' but champagny."
This just in, the news peg for this financial etymology: "The venerable greenback is no longer going to appear all green," The Associated Press reports. (To be precise, it's only the back that's all green.) To confound counterfeiters in this age of digital imagery, Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing is rolling out a multicolored version of the US$20 bill, the US' most criminally copied item.
The freshened-up Andy (Andrew Jackson) will be peachy-keen, with subtle blue and green shadings and highlighted with dozens of little yellow dots whispering "20," all making it as hard to replicate as a sophisticated teenager's hairdo. Only two out of every 10,000 bills with Andrew Jackson's face are counterfeit, but it adds up.
Higher-denomination bills will be further colorized in coming years, but there are no plans to complicate the buck or the fin; no self-respecting counterfeiter wastes his time on a US$1 or a US$5 bill. Thanks to that, the word greenback will maintain its currency in the American language.
MOOLAH
Investigating the "high-stakes slot room" of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, the columnist Eugene Kane of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted, "We're talking serious moola here."
This is a slang term for money. Mario Pei, the language-in-action philologist of years ago, was sure "it was Chuck Green, a friend of Damon Runyon, who invented moolah." The columnist Runyon, whose grasp of Broadway lingo was immortalized in the musical Guys and Dolls, wrote in 1939, "He is very desperate for a little moolah."
The origin is a mystery. The current spelling with an h, "moolah," is shown by a database count to be preferred over the variant "moola," which suggests that in pronunciation, the first syllable has no greater stress than the second. The word breaks into "moo-lah." Speculation, especially welcome with citations, will be entertained at onlanguage at symbol nytimes.com.
DEFLATION
On Dec. 19, 2002, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, told the Economic Club of New York, "The United States is nowhere close to sliding into a pernicious deflation."
In February, in the question-and-answer portion of his semiannual testimony to Congress, he repeated the sentiment, "Indeed, our general presumption is that we seek stable prices, and stable prices mean no inflation or deflation."
On April 30, again reporting to Congress, he used a less scary term, "With price inflation already at a low level, substantial further disinflation would be an unwelcome development."
Ten days later, a statement from the board on the interest rate used a different formulation, "the probability of an unwelcome substantial fall in inflation, though minor."
On May 21 he returned to the key word without the modifier "pernicious": "We at the Federal Reserve recognize that deflation is a possibility," he told members of Congress. "Even though we perceive the risks as minor, the potential consequences are very substantial and could be quite negative."
When Senator Robert Bennett, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, recalled his previous use of the word deflation, the Fed chairman asked, "Did I use the word deflation?"
Bennett replied, "You kind of danced around it, but that's the way it came across."
Greenspan smiled. "It was my interpreter," he said.
Deflation is a rise in the value of money as prices of goods and services fall (that's good for most people, especially savers and those on fixed incomes) but a drop in wages and credit and an increase in unemployment (bad for workers, lenders and investors). While disinflation is a slowing of the rise in prices, deflation is the actual fall in prices. It last happened in the US during the 1930s, not a happy time, and is thus regarded with some dread.
The earliest use of the word in The New York Times archive was by Edmund Fisher, a deputy controller of New York City in 1913, discussing "the volume of inflation and deflation in our alternate periods of business activity and depression."
No politician today likes to use that last word lightly. If we should move from unwelcome disinflation to pernicious deflation, the hopeful term to keep an eye out for is invigorating reflation.
YARD INFLATION
How long is a yard? Literalists will say 36 inches, nearly a meter. Ale drinkers define it as a long, slender glass of their favorite beverage, holding about two pints.
In business slang, a yard started out as a US$100 bill: One hundred dollars is a "century" or a "yard," The American Mercury observed in 1926.
Then came the good times for the "C-note," followed by the crash, and American Speech in 1932 defined "yard" as a "G" or a "grand": $1,000.
Fast-forward to this millennium. (I use the verb "fast-forward" as a useful antonym for the movie term flashback, but with the takeover of videotape by DVD, "fast-forward" will be fast junked. Maybe we'll reach back to "skip ahead.")
According to Paul Maidment, executive editor of Forbes -- who watches the foreign-exchange markets and their inside lingo -- "Yard is now forex slang for a billion." It's clearer to say "I'm a buyer of a yard of yen" than to say "I'm a buyer of a billion yen," which could easily be misheard as "I'm a buyer of a million yen."
From a hundred bucks to a billion yen -- is the yard due for a semantic crash?
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