Diamon Searls remarks that “when the penny eventually goes the inevitable way of the half cent and the Canadian penny (extinct as of 2012)” – and good riddance – we will lose “the last possible link between our language of money and the everyday physical world”:
[The etymology of penny] is uncertain, though the ending implies a Germanic origin—the
word used to be penning, with an -ing, like shilling and farthing, instead of a -y. The root may be Pfand, which turned into the English word pawn meaning “a pledge or token”: in that case, penny basically just means money. …
A quarter is a fourth of a dollar, a dime a tenth (Old French dîme, Latin decima), a cent a hundredth or one percent—all math. Anyway, a cent is not a piece of money: a U.S. penny is technically a cent or one-cent coin, but in spoken language, a cent is a value and a penny is a coin. We offer someone our two cents, not two pennies; pennies can clink in your pocket, cents can’t.
(Image by Flickr user yaybiscuits123)
The Dish 