I purchased this note at the FUN show. It has a denomination of 12 1/2 cents or a "bit." That might seem like odd amount today, but in 19th century America, it was quite common. The Spanish dollar was divided into 8 parts, which works out to 12 1/2 cents. It was not unusual to have items prices in bits, not dimes. Members of my father's generation sometimes called a quarter "two bits." That slang term has disappeared today, but it was around for a long time.
I remember the term being used when I was a child, as in when hopping off the barber's chair he would say, "That'll be six bits!" After almost a century and a half of usage, it died because (1) the older generation stopped talking to the younger generation so much, killing lots of expressions, and (2) inflation gradually made "two bits" coins buy less and less, thus being used less and less. Today's kids hardly know what coins are. There is one place where the term survives. Some schools still have cheerleaders who shout, "Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar! All for the [name of school's mascot], stand up and holler." Of course, they have no idea where it came from.
The last vestige of bit pricing in the US ended in August 2000 when the stock market switched from pricing in eighths of a dollar to tenths of a dollar.
Does that have any relevance to the insult of calling someone a "two bit" chump or whatever else someone threw at them?
Seems like mortgages are still commonly priced in 1/8th% increments. I've taught my kids that "two bits" means a quarter and where it originated. It probably didn't stick with them though. My parents and grandparents used it a lot. Nowadays a "bit" is presumed to be computer-related I think. Also it seems like very few people nowadays say nowadays.
I've always thought that the idea that there are eight bits in a byte in computers comes, at least subconsciously, from the eight bits in a Spanish Milled Dollar. Of course, there are good engineering reasons for the numbers, but the terminology seems more than coincidental.
