Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 18 September 2004

A Lexicographer writes

‘Gresham’s Law,’ said my husband unkindly, possessing himself of the zapper and hopping between channels quite unnecessarily. I had just asked him the difference between an irrational number and a transcendental number.

‘Gresham’s Law’ is his shorthand for: ‘Something you don’t understand.’ It is true that in the past every time I have asked, ‘What does Gresham’s Law mean?’ my husband has said, ‘Ah, you don’t understand.’ That is surely what I had admitted by asking the question in the first place. I knew Gresham’s Law said: ‘Bad money drives out good.’ But what that meant or how it could happen were blanks to me. I need only have looked up the 17th definition of the word law in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Gresham’s Law is ‘the principle, involved in Sir Thomas Gresham’s letter to Queen Elizabeth in 1558, that “bad money drives out good”, i.e., that when debased money is current in the same country with coins of full legal weight and fineness, the latter will tend to be exported, leaving the inferior money as the only circulating medium.’

I see now. It’s by exportation that the good money is driven out. Gresham was always bringing home from abroad, as fine presents for useful people, things like sausages, tongues and paving-stones. Edward VI was said to have been squared by a pair of Spanish silk stockings. Perhaps the sausages, tongues, paving-stones and silk stockings left in circulation abroad were correspondingly impoverished, but it did him no harm. He seems to have been something of a crook, and his great achievement, the wonderful edifice of the Royal Exchange, was burnt down in 1666.

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