savbuck: half a sawbuck
Coining while the coining’s good: an offhand remark by a new Metafilter member today lead to a sidebar on what “sawbuck” does or doesn’t mean.
Key points:
- Mefi charges five bucks for a new account.
- a sawbuck is ten dollars (a ten-spot, a hamilton, a tenner)
- it’s fun to pretend that something was a typo rather than more strongly incorrect.
So: sawbuck as typo for savbuck. w as alternate rendering of x, as vv. Spread the word. Inform some credulous young persons.
(This also suggests a possibility for an alternate form of sawbuck: saxbuck, to fold back in the supposed X-means-10,X-looks-like-sawhorse etymology explicitly. I’d describe that as “pushing it”, except I don’t think I was standing on very defensible ground in the first place here.)
Bonus link: languagehat discovers “sawbuck”, back in 2002.
language hat Said,
August 2, 2008 @ 3:37 pm
Hey now! Anatoly Vorobey had just discovered the word; I, as you will discover if you read the post with your glasses on, have “known the word as long as I can remember.”
Josh Millard Said,
August 2, 2008 @ 3:46 pm
You can’t ever totally prove that I wasn’t using “languagehat discovers” in some euphemistic sense along the lines of “the site languagehat notes a process of discovery of”, can you?
No. No, you cannot.
language hat Said,
August 5, 2008 @ 8:44 am
Curses! Foiled again!
Josh Millard Said,
August 5, 2008 @ 8:47 am
Also, I’d like to imagine a greek philopher Kibo remembered primarily for this paradox:
Q: If a sawbuck is ten dollars, and a savbuck half a sawbuck, then what is a savbuck?
A: A double sawbuck, same as in town.
Tom Clancy Said,
August 7, 2008 @ 9:10 am
I’ll stick with “fin”.