fun fact: as a child I assumed lb stood for "little babies," and that a little baby weighed exactly one lb

so apparently it actually comes from the Latin phrase "libra pondo," which means "weight on the scales"

the Roman libra was 328g as opposed to the modern lb which is 453, and it had 12 "unciae," which, you guessed it, were "ounces"

so while the size of an lb changed, ounces have remained pretty much consistent

there are also Troy ounces (still used for precious metals) which may have come from the measures in the city of Troyes in the 9th century, and there are 12 troy ounces to a troy pound, but a troy pound is 373g, so closer to the libra but still not quiiiite the same

then there was the Tower pound, which was the weight of 120 Arabic dirhams, and was used by the Hanseatic League a lot

and the Mercantile pound gets thrown in there too, as well as something called the London pound

the only pre-metric way to differentiate between all of these is a unit of measure called "grains," and this is where it gets super interesting, because I'd seen "grains" used as a measure of weight before, but "grains" of what?

wheat

it's grains of wheat

if you wanted to be super specific about a unit of weight, counting out a ton of seeds and balancing them on the scale was a good way to do it, and in practical terms, weighing a bag of grain is a faster way to figure out how many grains are in it than going through and counting

so do I think we should abandon the lb? yes, of course, it's ludicrous to keep using it in everyday modern society when we have a perfectly good metric system

but is it cool that it has a link to our ancient agrarian past? yeah, it's neat as hell!

then we come to one of my favorite units of measure, the "stone"

which literally just uh means... hey, we all agreed that this one rock is the rock we weigh stuff against when we're trading things

"stone" tended to be anywhere from 5 to 40 lbs, it varied from place to place

and "stone" could vary from industry to industry too

so the modern (well, "modern," because metric has surpassed it for most things) stone weighs 14 lbs and was based on the stone used by the British wool industry

which makes sense considering how much of Britain's exports were made up of wool for centuries

also as a side-note, the Church basically dominated the British wool trade and made a killing off of it

and that may well have played into Henry VIII's decision to break away from the Church and whoops, seize the monasteries and loot them

"Do not use dishonest standards when measuring length, weight or quantity. Use honest scales and honest weights, an honest ephah and an honest hin. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt" (Leviticus 19:35-36).

okay, so now let's look at where the "ephah" and "hin" in Scripture come from...

surprise surprise, it's Babylon

the Semitic root S-Q-L relates to weight, and it's where we get the word "shekel" in Hebrew and "thiqal" in Arabic

because it's Babylon and they had a hard-on for Base 60 (which is reflected in our divisions of hours and seconds to this day, incidentally),

60 shekels = 1 mina
60 mina = 1 talent

so all those talents of gold from the Illiad? they were 3600 shekels of gold

1 mina was equal to 100 Roman denerii, and then when the denerius started getting used in the Levant, it was called a "zuz"

so that goat that your father bought for two zuzim?

it would have cost him 1.2 shekels https://vimeo.com/133054221 

of course then we have to figure out if we're talking about shekels of gold or shekels of silver, and then the purity of the metal itself becomes an issue, because remember the shekel is just the weight, not necessarily the value

you know what else was a unit of weight that was associated with value? the mark.

in medieval Germany, the mark was about 8oz, so if you started talking about precious metals, you might talk about how many marks of silver you had

and eventually that lead to the Deutschmark

now a Deutschmark was never actually a full mark of silver, but it was based off a coin called the Vereinsthaler, which was generally 1/14th of a mark of silver

does that word "thaler" ring a bell?

it should

because it's related to the word "dollar"

dollars of silver and dollars of gold are *actually units of weight*

and I can feel the ghost of William Jennings Bryant screaming below my floorboards as I say this

don't worry, Bill, I'm not planning on crucifying anybody on a cross of gold today

of course we've long since been off the Gold Standard, so a "dollar" is now just a unit of value, but it all ties back to weights and measures being an essential part of the economy

and coins and rocks and well, now that I'm grown, probably not little babies

(Twitter is a format that really enables these kind of meandering rants-- I'm trying to imagine this all as an essay and it would be all the fuck over the place lol)

based on this whole discussion (discussion meaning me talking to myself), then we come to the question of... what kind of commodity makes a good currency?

ideally it's something that is

1) easily portable
2) desirable
3a) rare
3b) not so rare that it's hard to trade it

in the third Hitchhiker's book when they started using leaves for currency obviously they had an issue that leaves were too plentiful, so they started burning down forests so that leaves would become rare enough to be valuable

go the other direction and you get stuff like the Micronesian Rai stones from the island of Yap

they're nice and durable, but uh... good luck moving one. people just mentally remember who the stone belongs to now after a major transaction has occurred

that system is more of an honor-based currency than a commodity-based one, and you in some ways could replace the Rai stones with just... favors

you did me a favor, now I owe you a favor

we could make "favors" a system of currency

I will trade three favors to buy a hot dog

the problem with an honor-based currency is when someone says "nah, I don't feel like it" and you're stuck having done a bunch of favors for people and getting jack shit out of it all, which...

*rolls eyes*

I can definitely relate to

so what instead if we decided that if I do you a favor, you give me a little bit of silver that I can trade for somebody else doing me a favor

yeah at this point I'm just rehashing econ 101, I know