A number of years ago, a Hong Kong TV station sent me to the US to cover a presidential election. I was accompanied by a couple of Hong Kong Chinese colleagues. We were staying at a motel, and one evening I ran across the cameraman in a corridor, shouting at a Coke machine.
He had spent several frustrating minutes trying to buy himself a soft drink. When I approached he showed me a handful of coins and said he couldn’t figure out which ones to use. He had been putting a bunch of different coins into the machine, but it wasn’t enough.
My colleague was frustrated because there are no numbers on US coins. None. Only cryptic messages like “quarter dollar”, which is okay if you understand that a quarter means 25%; or “one dime”, which might be comprehensible if you speak Latin. The nickel and penny at least spell out their value—five cents and one cent.
But if you don’t speak English, that doesn’t help. My poor friend had been stuffing pennies in the machine because they were larger than dimes. I helped him buy a Coke, but I could tell he was still perturbed that American coins had no numbers. Didn’t ALL coins have numbers? Well, yes, pretty much any currency you ever handle has numbers, usually including Roman numerals, even if the local language uses different script. US coins don’t.
I had never realised this fact before that night. And since that day I have never met an American who was already aware that their coins don’t feature any numbers.
Now, write back if you already knew this strange fact—and let me know if you noticed it all by yourself, or if someone pointed it out to you. Americans grow up knowing the value of each coin, but it’s not so obvious to others!
Peter Maize 