A Payday Loan for Your Thoughts

The nerve!

"A penny for your thoughts" – it's such an annoying idiom. That anyone might attempt to enter into the sanctity of my thoughts for so little! However, I must admit that I've used the expression myself, despite the obvious insufficiency of the proffered legal tender. Worse yet, I have sometimes asked, "whacha thinkin?" without offering any consideration at all — as though I were entitled to have another’s thoughts for free. In a world that turns on money, how ever did I develop this mindset?

The unloved penny

In 2007 the Rockefeller Center hosted a display of 100 million pennies collected by public school children. These children obviously loved pennies.  But for many years a surging wave of adults has sought to abolish this humble coin. Grown-ups do not like pennies. Children may save pennies in a jar and use them to buy things. But if an adult puts a penny in a jar, it will stay there forever. Busy people simply throw pennies away.

Most overseas military posts and bases have done away with the penny. You can use pennies to pay, but you will not get them back in change. (By the way, did vending machines or pay phones ever accept pennies?)

Where did the saying come from?

Like so many English idioms, we really don't know when this one got started. But we can be certain it was in use back when a penny still had some appreciable value. The saying appears in "Four Last Things" written by English humanist scholar Sir Thomas More in 1522. (More, it should be noted, coined the word "utopia," but wore a hair shirt every day and was beheaded in 1535.) ... click here to read the rest of the article titled "A Payday Loan for Your Thoughts"