1148. This week, we look at penny idioms that are still "legal tender" in our language even as the U.S. penny is retired. We look at the history of phrases like "a bad penny" and "penny wise and pound foolish." Then, we look at the linguistic history of procrastination, explaining how human nature changed words like "soon," "anon," and "presently" from meaning "at once" to "in a little while."
1148. This week, we look at penny idioms that are still "legal tender" in our language even as the U.S. penny is retired. We look at the history of phrases like "a bad penny" and "penny wise and pound foolish." Then, we look at the linguistic history of procrastination, explaining how human nature changed words like "soon," "anon," and "presently" from meaning "at once" to "in a little while."
The penny segment was written by Karen Lunde, a longtime writer and editor turned web designer and marketing mentor. Solo service business owners come to her for websites where beautiful design meets authentic words that actually build connections. Find her at chanterellemarketingstudio.com.
The linguistics of procrastination segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, I have a penny for your thoughts, and then we'll look at how procrastination has changed language.
But first, things are going well with the Grammarpaloozians over on Patreon. Thank you so much to everyone who has signed up to support the show. They got a surprise full-size crossword puzzle last week that you can still access if you sign up now. It's a great way to help and also get all kinds of fun extras. Visit Patreon.com/grammargirl to see your options.
This next segment is by Karen Lunde.
By Karen Lunde
My friend told me that just the other day, she spotted a sign at her favorite coffee stand encouraging customers to pay with exact change or with a credit or debit card due to a penny shortage.
Signs like those might become more and more familiar in 2026! If you’ve been following the headlines, you know that the U.S. Treasury officially stopped minting pennies on November 12, 2025. After 232 years in existence, the humble one-cent coin is officially sunsetting, although it's still legal tender.
In Episode 1118, we talked about dime idioms like "stopping on a dime" and "dropping a dime." Today, in honor of the penny’s retirement, we’re going to look at the other side of the coin. Or at least another type of coin.
It may be the end of an era for the penny, but we're sure to still be talking about pennies for years to come. Plenty of phrases have outlived the objects or actions they describe. After all, we still "hang up" the phone even though all we do now is push a button.
First, have you ever had a problem that just wouldn’t go away, or an annoying acquaintance who kept showing up at your door? You might say, "A bad penny always turns up."
Well, the term "bad penny" is really old, going back to medieval times.
OK, I can hear the history buffs screaming, "Wait a minute! The U.S. Mint didn't start striking pennies until 1793!" And that's absolutely right. But the word "penny" is much older than the United States. It comes from the Old English "penig," and the British have been using pennies for more than a thousand years. We Americans just borrowed the name for our one-cent coin.
So, back in medieval England, coins were made of precious metals like silver. A "bad penny" was a coin that was either counterfeit or had been "clipped" (had its edges shaved off for the metal). If you were a merchant, you didn’t want a bad penny because it wasn't worth its face value.
If you accidentally ended up with one, you’d try to spend it as fast as possible. But often, the person you tried to pay would notice the fraud and refuse it, handing it right back to you. So, that "bad penny" literally returned to you over and over again.
Next, when you notice someone staring blankly into space and you want to know what they're thinking, you might say, "A penny for your thoughts."
Today, offering someone a single cent for their ideas seems like an insult. But when this phrase was coined (pun intended!), a penny was actually worth something.
This idiom first appeared in the 16th century. For example, in Sir Thomas More's book "The Four Last Things" (which was written around 1522), he wrote about someone whose mind was wandering so much that others would "sodainly say to them: a peny for your thought."
In the early 1500s, a penny was a decent amount of money. So, originally, this wasn't a cheap offer; it was a sincere bid to buy something of value.
Next, when you offer an opinion, especially an unsolicited one, you’re “putting your two cents in.” The phrase may use a characteristically American unit of money, but the underlying idea goes back further.
A British version of the expression — “putting in your two pennies’ worth” (also written as “two-penn’orth”) — appeared in 1851 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and suggests a modest, slightly self-deprecating contribution. It's like saying, “Here’s my small amount of input, for whatever it’s worth.”
As for the exact origin, etymologists don’t agree. There are a few theories floating around, including links to gambling, where players needed a small mandatory ante to join a game. But there’s no definitive evidence connecting the phrase to any single source.
What is clear is that by the 1900s, Americans had adapted the British “two pennies’ worth” into the familiar “two cents,” keeping the same humble tone: a small, possibly uninvited contribution to the discussion.
Now, if you’re lucky enough to find a rare 1943 copper penny, it might "cost a pretty penny" to buy it. This idiom means something is expensive.
You might assume this phrase came about because copper pennies are shiny and "pretty." But the Oxford English Dictionary traces this one back to the early 1700s, long before the familiar copper penny we know today was standard. (British pennies were often small silver coins back then.)
The playwright Susanna Centlivre used the phrase "a pretty penny" in her play "The Man's Bewitch'd" in 1709. In this context, "pretty" didn't mean "beautiful"; it meant "considerable" or "fine," similar to how we might say a "fair amount" or a "handsome sum."
So, a "pretty penny" is literally a "considerable amount of money," regardless of what the coin actually looks like.
Finally, as we say goodbye to the penny, we should be careful not to be "penny wise and pound foolish."
This is a warning against being stingy with small amounts of money while being careless with large amounts. For example, driving 20 miles out of your way to save two cents on gas — you save the pennies at the pump, but you waste dollars in fuel, your time, and wear and tear on your car to get there.
The proverb "penny wise and pound foolish" shows up in print by the early 1600s in writers such as Edward Topsell and later appears in Robert Burton’s "Anatomy of Melancholy" (from 1621).
It makes perfect sense in the context of the old British currency system. There were 240 pennies in one pound sterling. If you spent all your energy guarding the individual pennies but let the "pounds" (the big units) slip away, you were failing at math and finance.
The U.S. Treasury says the penny has become too expensive to produce — it actually costs more than one cent to make one! So in a way, keeping the penny around this long was a classic case of being "penny wise and pound foolish."
While we might stop seeing Lincoln’s profile in our change jars, these idioms are legal tender in the English language forever. They remind us of a time when a small disc of copper (or silver) could send a letter, buy a loaf of bread, or even buy a friend's thoughts.
That segment was written by Karen Lunde, a longtime writer and editor turned web designer and marketing mentor. Solo service business owners come to her for websites where beautiful design meets authentic words that actually build connections. Find her at chanterellemarketingstudio.com.
This next segment is by Valerie Fridland.
by Valerie Friedland
Most of us procrastinate — after all, no one really jumps at the chance to write a term paper or is in a rush to make that appointment for an overdue colonoscopy — but, besides the guilt we feel when we push something off we know we need to do, have you ever wondered how our tendency to drag our feet has affected our language?
It turns out that our human propensity for procrastinating — as well as exaggerating how quickly we think we'll do something — is nothing new, and looking back at changes in word meanings earlier in our history can show us just how this part of being human has reshaped the words we use every day.
First, take the word "soon." When someone tells you they'll be there "soon," what does that mean to you?
Well, for most of us, it means they'll arrive within a reasonably short time, but not right this minute. In fact, if you showed up on my doorstep immediately, I might even be a bit annoyed since I had anticipated having a little time to clean up my messy kitchen.
But if we go back in time to the word’s inception, in Old English, “sóna” meant something a bit different from how we use it today. In these early days of English, around the 7th through 10th centuries, the word meant “immediately” rather than how we use it to mean “in a short while” today.
Since Old English is quite different (and unintelligible) compared to modern English, it is hard to give a direct example, but essentially “He went soon into battle,” would have meant, “He went at once into battle,” rather than "shortly" as we would understand it in modern English.
There was also no equivalent to modern comparatives such as “sooner,” since the whole point is that you are doing something right away. There isn’t a way to do it more right away than you intended.
Likely, our human tendency to be a little slow to motivate, coupled with our tendency to exaggerate how quickly something would happen, started to influence when and how "soon" was used.
For example, even early on, people seemed to have used the word “soon” even if it was a bit of an exaggeration of how immediately something would happen, as in a child telling his parents, “I am soon (at once) to bed,” while still playing marbles. Thus, such expressive tendencies stretched the meaning of the word to a sense of “sort of but not quite immediately.”
By the early Middle English period (around the 12th century), "soon" — often written at the time as "sonne" [S-O-N-N-E] — started to be mainly used to mean “shortly” and, as a result, developed a comparative sense (i.e., "sooner") by the 13th century.
While in modern English, "soon" is only used in its sense of “shortly” anymore, we do see echoes of its original meaning when it is used in the “as soon as” construction. So, for instance, if one says, “I will leave as soon as you get home,” it still conveys the meaning of immediacy or at once, per its original sense.
As it turns out, our tendency toward slowness and exaggeration has not just shifted the meaning of the adverb "soon" over time, but several other temporal adverbs as well.
For instance, in "Romeo and Juliet," Juliet, in trying to put off her nursemaid for a bit longer, tells her she will come "anon." While we don’t "anon" each other very much anymore, in Shakespeare’s day, it carried the meaning of "shortly" or "a short while."
But, like "soon," the earlier meaning of "anon" was "at once" or "immediately," as in "he wente him anone," meaning "he went at once." But, around the 15th century, this meaning became archaic, and it took on the meaning, as for Shakespeare, of "in just a bit" or "in a little while."
More recently, we see this same type of creep in the meaning of still another time-oriented adverb — namely, the adverb "presently."
Though in modern use, both "soon" and "anon" have completely lost their earlier sense of “at once,” we still see a touch of this meaning lingering in the “(at) present” part of "presently."
Not surprisingly, the word’s earliest meaning (around the 14th century) was “immediately” and, in rare use, "presently" is still used with this more “at this moment” sense, as in “I am presently heading to the store.” But today when someone says they will do something presently, they typically mean “in just a bit,” and this less immediate meaning has been the most prominent one since the 17th century.
The shift in usage from the older sense to the current one was subtle, as it could often be ambiguous as to which sense one intended (as in the example just given), and it is this potential for listener misinterpretation that probably ushered in the move from this earliest meaning to the modern one.
So, will our tendency for procrastination and exaggeration continue to ravage our temporal adverbs as it has in our past? Unless human nature changes drastically over the next decades, very likely. In fact, just ask the adverb "directly" how it is faring these days.
References
Brinton, Laurel. 2006. Pathways in the Development of Pragmatic Markers in English. In Ans van Kemenade, Bettelou Los (eds.) Handbook of the History of English. Blackwell. 306-334
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “anon, adv., Etymology”, July 2023.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “presently, adv.”, July 2023.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “soon, adv.”, July 2023.
Smith, Jeremy. 1996. An historical study of English : function, form and change. Routledge.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
Finally, I have a familect story from Paul:
"Hello Mignon. When one of us was driving and we would get lost, my dad would always say, 'Another Tanner tour.' And none of us knew what the origin of that was, but Tanner was a bus tour company — a sightseeing company — in Los Angeles in the 1940s and '50s."
Thanks, Paul! I wondered whether "Another Tanner tour" might have been a catchphrase the company used in its advertising, so I went looking for old ads. I found some old Tanner brochures on eBay, and none of them seem to use that phrase, but if you'd like to see them just for fun, I put a link in the show notes.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a special word or phrase you use with your family, leave a message on the voicemail line or record a message on Speakpipe, and you'll find the information for both those options in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Rebekah Sebastian and Nat Hoopes in marketing; Dan Feierabend in audio; Morgan Christianson in advertising; and Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts, who is currently reading "The Wedding People."
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all. Thanks for listening.