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05/31/2013

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Bill R

The Canadian 2 dollar coins are called toonies, of course.

Brent

There was a short period of time around here where "doubloon" was used, but "toonie" eventually crushed it... linguistic blends being already on their way to overtaking puns as the lowest form of humour[*] at the time.

[*] Really, they are. They carry the same double meanings as puns, only instead of having to find two actual words that sound alike, you just smush together whatever two words you want into a neologism.

Mike Peterson

I think the toonie debuted just before I moved south. I seem to remember a problem either with the initial design or maybe just one batch. The coin has a silver (colored) outer rim surrounding a copper (colored) circle, and that center piece started falling out of coins. My solution would have been that each piece would then be worth a dollar, but that hasn't worked since the days of Cap'n Flint.

In any case, it's one more example of the Canadians being too polite to muck up their lives the way we do -- thanks to the fact that they don't lie on the ground screaming and kicking their feet every time a sensible change is suggested, they've got dollar (and two dollar) coins, they're on the metric system, and, as Jonathan Wing would point out, they're "basically unarmed Americans with health coverage."

Mike Peterson

And speaking of Cap'n Flint and pieces of eight, a piece of Quebecois coin-related trivia: Because the French got kicked out in 17whatever, Quebec French was left to develop its own slang, cut off from the rest of the francophone community. While some slang -- autoroute and depanneur for instance -- is quite contemporary, and some other would make the Academie blanch, as in "le weekend," there are also a couple of odd holdovers from the Olden Days when whatever coins happened to be available were as good as whatever else was available and you never knew who was going to tie up in port: Slang for a dollar, on a level with "buck," is "piastre" and for cents, "sou." So $2.03 would be "deux piastres, trois sous," or, as they say in Quebec, "dupiastwasoo."

Gilda Blackmore

Nice of you Mike Peterson, but we do occasionally lie on the ground screaming and kicking our feet about our present "Harper Government". And maybe one of these days we'll actually use our kicking feet to kick this trou d'cul in his cul.

Suzii

Note: It isn't that 40% of women outearn their mates. It's that in 40% of American households, a mother is the primary breadwinner. In 25.3%, that's because a mother is the only adult in the house. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/business/economy/women-as-family-breadwinner-on-the-rise-study-says.html

About 24% of female-plus-male couples have a woman who earns more, and I'm sure some of those have relatively minimal income gaps, so you couldn't call her a primary breadwinner.

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