... Greenbacks, lettuce, geldt, bread, bucks, stash, moolah, --- ***MONEY-HONEY***, a.k.a. --- DOLLARS... Did you know that the dollar sign [$] is actually a corruption of an 8, that, of course, meant "pieces of eight", the standard currency of almost anywhere in the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in the United States up to about 1857? Yes, yes...
The phase "two bits" came from the time when silver pesos were cuts into eight equal pieces. Two bits was two eights, --- a QUARTER dollar. Pieces of eight were made for about three hundred years in Mexico, Peru and Columbia. They were de rigeur in England and in the Colonies and valued at four shillings, six pense.
Gold was used for Spanish escudos, which were once the same value as pieces of eight. Golden doubloons were worth eight dollars. Before the Spanish started taking huge amounts of silver from a mountain in Potosi, which is today in Bolivia, silver had almost the same value as gold. But, such a lot of silver was taken from Potosi that it dropped the Worldwide value of silver, till it's worth about 1/15 of what gold is today.
Gold is very soft so that gold coins where likely to be scraped or chipped to get a bit extra from them before they were used in transactions... So, soon enough, someone thought of minting them with milled edges, even silver coins, to discourage this practice... Shame, shame... So naughty, to scrape those coins! ;)
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