I was enjoying the thread on whizzing when I happened to buy this coin. I had run into the term "Smoothed Surface" and also "Tooled" in the ancients forum (which I'm going to post this one on also), but had never run into it for modern coins. What do you think...
I think PCGS go it right. The obverse looks like it had been whizzed (look at the distortion on the ribbon) and then smoothed out by polishing and/or burnishing.
Hey, I guess if every successive Heritage catalog can come up with a brand new color name, why not, huh?
If you search heritage archives, there are 92 ancient and 1642 US coins with this description. Whizzed and smoothed mean very different things. I am sure there is no conflagration of the terms.