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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GDJMSP, post: 2810718, member: 112&quot;]Well, I don&#039;t know who taught you Bill, but you and I both grew up in the same age, you&#039;re only 2 years younger than me. And that &quot;age&quot; we&#039;re referring to would be the 1960&#039;s. And in the 60&#039;s cleaning your coins was the accepted practice - the norm - just about everybody did it.</p><p><br /></p><p>But apparently, like you, my grandfather taught me from the age of 7 that cleaning your coins was not a good thing, and that you should not do it.</p><p><br /></p><p>However, even that far back, when someone said &quot;cleaning&quot; what they really meant was &quot;harshly cleaning&quot;, to say cleaning was just them using the contraction of the phrase. It was harsh cleaning that was bad, not cleaning. Even back then coins could be cleaned, if they were cleaned properly, and nobody had a problem with it.</p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s the same thing today. The 1960&#039;s was the beginning of the change. For literally centuries collectors would routinely get their coins out and wipe them all down with rags or cloths. And they would do this on a regular basis. It was their idea of what they were supposed to do. It was their idea of how they were supposed to take care of their coins. But as I said in the 60&#039;s that began to change.</p><p><br /></p><p>There were youngsters like you, and me, who were taught that &quot;cleaning&quot; your coins was not a good thing, that it was in fact a bad thing. But back then there were only a few of us like that, most collectors went right on doing it as they always had for the last 500 years. But eventually wisdom prevailed and the tables turned. Collectors, for the most part, stopped using harsh cleaning techniques on their coins. But it took a couple of decades for that to happen. And the mantra became - DO NOT &quot;clean&quot; your coins ! But they were still using the contraction. The contraction, cleaning, had become the accepted term, when what they really meant was &quot;harshly cleaning&quot;.</p><p><br /></p><p>Also, even in the 1960&#039;s, and long before that, dipping your coins was a perfectly acceptable practice - hardly anybody had a problem with it as long as it was done correctly. So was doing things like rinsing them off in distilled water - nobody had a problem with that either - because it did not hurt or damage the coin in any way. But what is dipping or rinsing your coins if it not cleaning them ? It is in fact cleaning them for that is exactly what you are doing. But it is not harshly cleaning them. That&#039;s the difference.</p><p><br /></p><p>An again, it&#039;s the same thing today. Knowledgeable people KNOW the difference. They know that it is perfectly acceptable, perfectly fine because it does no harm, to &quot;clean&quot; your coins - as long as you do it correctly. </p><p><br /></p><p>Think of it like this Bill, you wash your hands all the time don&#039;t you ? In fact you wash your whole body all the time - you clean your body. But you do it correctly, because if you do it correctly it does no harm to your body. But now imagine if you took steel wool and washed/cleaned your body with it ? Of course you&#039;d never do that. Why ? Because you know it would be the incorrect way, your body would look like raw hamburger if you cleaned it with steel wool. It would have been harshly cleaned.</p><p><br /></p><p>Same thing with coins. Do it correctly and there is no harm. Do it incorrectly and there is definitely harm. So yes, you can &quot;clean&quot; your coins. But you cannot &quot;harshly clean&quot; your coins.</p><p><br /></p><p>So no, it&#039;s not hypocritical, it&#039;s just common sense.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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