December 27th, 2007

Mike Terry of Yet Another Damned Blog:

The gas station I stopped at on my way to work has a sign advertising 2 Krispy Kreme donuts for $2, which means that the all-important dollars to donuts exchange rate is now one to one.

I hadn’t thought about it that way, but Terry has a point. Aside from its purely economic effects, persistent inflation has a corrosive effect on linguistic traditions: “In for a penny, in for a pound” actually meant something when even a penny had some actual purchasing power.

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