A pee for your thoughts

In Welsh, they know it as a senten, in Gaelic it’s a cheint, in Icelandic it’s a sent. In French, it may be called a cent, or a centime, or even a sou. In America, they call it a cent, or sometimes a penny.

In England, we call it a pee.

What’s going on here? The nation was agonisingly unhappy about giving up its shillings (we kept the pounds and – one thought – the pence). It wasn’t even a perfect duodecimal system. With 12 pence in a shilling, and 20 shillings in a pound, it was both batty and cumbersome. They still haven’t invented a calculator which can handle such a quaint counting system, and that’s exactly why we had to give it up.

The British loved their weird monetary system, and loved to show off to foreigners. You could bore them silly with smug explanations of florins, half-crowns, crowns and guineas. And that was before you got into slang like thruppeny bits and tanners.

But now, we’re all well-used to a decimal system. Our money works like everyone else’s. But, where everyone else bothers to pronounce the names of their currency, we don’t. At least, where it comes to one-hundredth of a pound, we don't. Why is it suddenly so hard to use words like penny or pence? The penny was invented in 790 AD, and we managed to call it a penny for the best of 1200 years after that. But then along came decimalisation, and we threw away a perfectly good name. Instead we use a name which sounds – and is – lazy and vulgar. And wet.

It’s probably the fault of us spivs in the advertising trade. Penny is two syllables. Pee is one. Your precious twenty-second TV or radio commercial is already overburdened by mandatory and time-consuming pointlessness like ‘your mortgage may go up or down only if it used as part of a calorie controlled diet which contains small parts and always read the label’. Then, when your client has insisted on the brand name being repeated eight times, in a carefully crafted script that only has room to say it three times, well, that’s when you start paring down the words themselves. ‘For less than a penny a day’ becomes for less than one pee a day’, which is one syllable less, and a godsend to a weak-willed agency team, when you’re still over length, studio time has run out, and the voice-over is already late for another gig on the other side of Soho.

It’s proof that advertising works. Kinda. Keep on defining hundredths of pounds as pee, and watch it fall into the language, where it inhabits the same world as legitimate words like ‘gallivanting’ or ‘jurisprudence’ or ‘perjorative’. All of those last three being delightful, roll-around-the-mouth-like-red-wine words, rich with style, dignity and sonorous texture. Oh, and syllables, too. In contrast, pee just doesn’t cut it.

Of course, brevity and clarity is often much more important than verbal felicity. How many times have I been told that? But there’s no call for ugliness in language, unless you’re German. Pee is a simply a solecism of the most stupid kind.

People don’t call cents sees. Goodness, even those Germans didn’t talk about pfees, when they had them.

We don’t have the Euro in the UK yet. It is, of course, unstoppably on its way. Across Europe, it’s pronounced airo or oiro or ooro, or something like that depending where you might be. In the UK we call it a uro, as in urological medicine. In which case, we could shorten that to wee.

And then, in our lazy, vulgar, brainless way, we can wee and pee all over proper English, no more now than a fast-shrinking dry patch in today’s sodden bed of our mother tongue.