Maree’s musings

The MYSTERY of … MONEY

We all know what money is and does. According to a song, it makes the world go round. If you have some; it will line your pockets or more commonly, burn a hole in them. It can slip through your fingers at the drop of a hat – the one that’s passed around, that is.
Money’s been with us for yonks, but our concept of it has changed. For a start, it was any object which had a certain value which could be used to ‘pay’ for something useful. This became handy to replace bartering – a swap system of real items such as cows, cooking pots, cereals etc; which didn’t always work out, as it relied on a ‘coincidence of wants’: that is, when you have something someone else wants, and vice versa.

Intermediate legal tender can delay the swap too. It’s convenient if you can flog off your unripe peaches while still ‘buying’ a suckling pig to scoff right now.
Many things have been used for tender. Grain was common: even now, having a few ‘shekels’ can get you by. Livestock – a problem to lug around, and unreliable in terms of worth. Alright if you had a fat cow and not an ancient old nag. Jack did well swapping his for five beans, surprisingly; but for general tender, ‘small is beautiful’. Silver and gold made into coins were much more convenient and had unchanging value. Later on, bits of paper became legal tender. Folding stuff still has a ‘feel good’ factor even in our modern cashless society.
I wonder what your favourite word for money is? Maybe bread or dough – the staple of life. Bucks probably referred to buckskins; while loot and lucre [especially the filthy variety) were originally ill-gotten gains. Then there’s moola/h, smackers, shekels, greenbacks, dosh, lolly, and ‘readies’.

Of course, just a VISA will do; and just waving it about nowadays seems to work.
The currencies of different countries have become commodities today. That’s sad! I can understand swapping some NZ dollars for a few euros, yen or yuans when you need them; but what’s with this daily trading and constant obsession with the exchange rate, when purchase of money has taken over real shopping? Weird.
Perhaps it’s also a sad thing that possession of wealth has become an end in itself. Miserliness has been made famous by Charles Dickens’ Ebeneezer Scrooge; and then there was Shakespeare’s Shylock who favoured his ducats over his daughter. A word of warning: both came to a sad end.
So: money, whatever form it takes, is nice to have to keep the wolf from the door. The accumulation of vast wealth, however … I wouldn’t know about that!