Re: Shape of the US Dollar Sign

From: Jonathan Coxhead (jonathan@doves.demon.co.uk)
Date: Tue Oct 02 2001 - 17:00:05 EDT


   I can't resist transcribing the following, which is a quotation from
_Love_and_Sleep_ by John Crowley (Bantam Books, 1994). (It's fiction.)

 | There are many Monarchs, and many Princes, but only one Emperor. Rudolf
 | II, King in his own right of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduke of Austria,
 | became Emperor by election and the chrism with which the Pope had anointed
 | his head: Singular and Universal Monarch of the Whole Wide World. Or at
 | least his shadow.
 |
 | His grandfather Charles, who had been king of all the lands Rudolf was
 | king of, had been king in Spain too, ruler of the Netherlands and Low
 | Countries; he was king of Savoy, lord of Naples and Sicily, he had had the
 | Pope at his feet and sacked His City, Rome. God's scourge. Charles had had a
 | device made for him, of all the famous devices and signs and emblems of
 | great rulers the most famous, known and seen throughout Christendom and in
 | lands around the world that the old emprerors in Rome had never known
 | existed. Charles's emblem showed two pillars---they were the Pillars of
 | Hercules that stand at the Gates of the Sea, the gates to the New World.
 | Around these pillars ran a banner, that bore these words: _Plus_oultra_,
 | "Even farther." The emblem was cut on medals and embossed on shields and
 | breastplates, it was engraved on wood and printed on the title pages of
 | geographies of the New World, and it was stamped on coins made of gold
 | that was dug on the other side of the world. The emblem was so famous that
 | it went on being stamped on gold coins for long after Charles was dead, for
 | so long that the dies lost their details, and the words of the motto were
 | worn away, and still it kept being stamped on Spanish coins, though all that
 | was left to be seen were the two pillars and the twining banner, no longer
 | meaning "Empire" or "Charles" or "Even farther" but only "dollar":
 |
 | $
 |
 | No kingdom is eternal.



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