Word Play: The iconic penny

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, July 11th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next: Word Play for July.

Today, we turn attention to a coin that’s held less and less value in currency—even though, in its earlier days, it had more value in copper.

Still, it’s valuable enough to have bought its way into our idioms, our memories, and our music.

Here is the invaluable George Grant.

GEORGE GRANT: Earlier this year the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it was phasing out the penny. After 233 years as a mainstay of the money supply, a lifespan nearly as long as the nation itself, the one cent coin will soon disappear from circulation.

Once a symbol of thrifty stewardship and practical value, the penny has come to represent government inefficiency and waste—it now costs four times more to make than it is worth. As P.J. O'Rourke quipped, “A penny will not buy a penny postcard or a penny whistle or a single piece of penny candy. It will not even, if you're managing the U.S. Mint, buy a penny.”

In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt complained to his treasury secretary, L. Mortimer Shaw, “I think the state of our coinage is artistically of atrocious hideousness.” To improve the aesthetics of the nation’s currency, the famed Beaux-Arts sculptor Victor David Brenner was first commissioned to design a new penny. It would be the first American coin to depict an historical figure, unveiled five years later to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.

In the decades since, the U.S. Mint has produced nearly 500 billion pennies featuring Brenner’s crisply articulated profile of the sixteenth president. According to James Panera, “In the history of the world no other sculpture has been as ubiquitous.

Not surprisingly that ubiquity not only shaped our economic transactions, but it also shaped our language. Think of all the names and phrases that the little copper coin has given us: a penny saved is a penny earned; penny wise and pound foolish; worth every penny; and a penny for your thoughts.

Pennies have even been featured in the lyrics of popular music: Lionel Richie sang “Penny Lover,” the Bee Gees sang “Throw a Penny,” Tony Martin and Dinah Shore sang “A Penny a Kiss,” the Carpenters sang “Drucilla Penny,” and the Beatles sang “Penny Lane.”

There are lucky pennies and bad pennies. There are pennies from Heaven and penny dreadfuls. There are pretty pennies and penny loafers. There are penny pinchers and penny antes. There are dollars and cents and not one red cent.

And of course, where would 007 be without Miss Money Penny?

It may be that none of us will soon have two cents to rub together, so before we get down to our last penny, I thought I’d better put in my two cents worth.

I’m George Grant.

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