Money talks: the origin of sayings about money

While meat in general has long been associated with prosperity, this phrase didn’t appear until the early twentieth century. Colloquial use might be harder to pin down, but the popularity of greased pig capturing contests at country fetes suggests a natural link between success, and pork in general. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest example of this phrase in print comes from P.G. Wodehouse in 1924:

“It may be that my bit will turn out to be just the trifle that brings home the bacon.”

The word ‘cool’ has evolved greatly since Henry Fielding used the phrase “cool hundred” in Tom Jones (1749):

“Watson rose from the table in some heat and declared he had lost a cool hundred.”

It wasn’t until the jazz age that ‘cool’ became associated with being hip or fashionable, leaving the modern reader to speculate as to whether a large amount of money might be chilling, or just very calm indeed.

You can also find it in Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861):

“She had wrote a little [codicil]… leaving a cool four thousand to Mr Mathew Pocket.”

Most British readers would associate this phrase with the tale of Dick Whittington – thrice Lord Mayor of London in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. However, the legend we know today wasn’t popularised until 1605.

As impractical as golden pavestones might seem, guild records suggest that several members of the Goldsmith’s Company joined the Paviors’ Company around 1470, bringing an unlikely union between two different trades.

There’s also a Biblical reference to gold streets, however the streets in question are to be found in heaven, rather than earth: 

The street of the city was pure gold (Revelation 21:21)

Long before music streaming services, and certainly before CDs, sheet music for ballads was sold very cheaply for DIY entertainment at home – perhaps around a piano in the parlour. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable suggests that this trade in low-cost songs might explain the origin of the phrase.

We know for sure that the phrase was in use by the early 17^th century – it appears in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well (1603):

I know a man that had this trick of melancholy sold a goodly manor for a song

Some readers might remember a 1965 BBC TV antiques quiz show called Going for a Song – a predecessor for perennial hit shows such as The Antiques Roadshow, which premiered in 1979.   

American newspaper reporter, Jacob Riis, used this expression in the title of an 1890 book about poverty in New York City. Since then, the phrase has been used to describe both ‘halves’ – whether richer or poorer.

The phrase comes from a proverb that the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1607:

One half of the world does not know how the other half lives

There’s an even earlier French source for the phrase in the first part of Rabelais’ novel pentalogy, The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (1532). This work gave rise to the eponymous term, Pantagruelism, which describes the use of humour as a satirical response to serious events. 

There’s no suggestion that we’re more likely to be use people named ‘Jones’ as benchmarks for taste, class, or success. The phrase was introduced to the world in Arthur R Momand’s New York Globe comic strip, which ran from 1913 to 1931.

Legend has it that the comic was inspired by Momand’s own neighbours – The Smiths. In the interest of good neighbourly relations, however, Momand called his strip Keeping up with the Joneses.

The concept of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ is connected with ‘conspicuous consumption.’ This term was coined by economist and sociologist, Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 critique of consumerism, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Conspicuous consumption describes the practice of purchasing goods as a way to broadcast social status or success – whether to Joneses, Smiths, or anyone else. 

While one penny might not buy much in the way of amusement in 2022, penny arcade games were all the rage since the late Victorian era – particularly at seaside towns. Popular examples included fortune-tellers, laughing policemen, and other animated scenes or figures.

Roy Orbison’s 1969 song release, Penny Arcade, described the allure of the penny arcade:

“Oh, step up and play”, each machine seemed to say
As I walked round and round the Penny Arcade
Just ring the bell on the big Bagatelle
And you’ll make all the coloured lights cascade

Players would have to wait for the penny to pass through the machine’s mechanism before activating the entertainment – which explains the origin of the phrase still in use today. “Ahhhhhh.” (The penny has dropped).

There are over 600,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, with more added every year