Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Yenom

I used to be redeemable for silver!




'Yenom' was what my dad (yours, too?) used to call money.  It was a funny-sounding word and he usually said it, somehow, by exaggerating both syllables.  I wonder how long it took me as a kid to realise that he was only saying 'money' backwards.

I have a wee collection of old 'yenom' amassed over 20 years of working in the service industry.  You'd think I'd have more old bills, really, but I actually have only a handful dating from both 1950 and 1957, to be exact.  Maybe they printed a mass of bills those two years and that would explain why more than a few landed in my hands?  -don't know.  The two dollar bills in my mini-collection all come from 1976 and specifically from my grandma who used to give me one, two-dollar bill each year upon my arrival of my 2-week visit to Paradise, CA. during the summer.


I'm still in circulation!



I'm still worth five dollars!





No 'In God We Trust' on me!






The woman at TD Bank thought I was counterfeit!



Apropos counterfeit, I've had more than one teller take her/his counterfeit pen and mark an old bill I had intended on depositing as it wasn't quite up to snuff to go into my collection (think: really wrinkled and/or torn).  -thing is that pen only works on newer bills as they are made to not react, as it were, to the nib of the pen.  Older bills simply show the mark of the pen both marring the bill and making any teller under the age of 30 suspicious.  One would think that folk who work in a bank would be trained how to recognize all valid bills in circulation.  If not, then maybe let's start pulling the old bills, so as not to confuse the young 'uns.

4 comments:

  1. very cool! my mom has one of those silver dollar bills and my dad has this neat 2 dollar bill all folded up like a bow tie. Very cool collection. I've got some coins a girlfriend sent me from NZ years ago, that's the extent of my collection of anything... Other than movie ticket stubs, lol.

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    1. Old money is fun! I've got some old silver coins and Indian head nickels, too. An older, German friend of mine gave me coins from the 1930s. They are very trippy.

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  2. I would think Yenom should be printed perfectly -- the few bills up here have strange-looking borders. What happened to quality control? *LOL*

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    Replies
    1. The base bit the fiver is TINY. I think that back then the cutting technology was not what it is today...maybe. I was feeling lazy and neglected to take snaps of the reverse sides of the bills. The color and clarity of the green images is, in comparison with newer bills, deep and vibrant.

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