Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 18 September 2004

A Lexicographer writes

issue 18 September 2004

‘Gresham’s Law,’ said my husband unkindly, possessing himself of the zapper and hopping between channels quite unnecessarily. I had just asked him the difference between an irrational number and a transcendental number.

‘Gresham’s Law’ is his shorthand for: ‘Something you don’t understand.’ It is true that in the past every time I have asked, ‘What does Gresham’s Law mean?’ my husband has said, ‘Ah, you don’t understand.’ That is surely what I had admitted by asking the question in the first place. I knew Gresham’s Law said: ‘Bad money drives out good.’ But what that meant or how it could happen were blanks to me. I need only have looked up the 17th definition of the word law in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Gresham’s Law is ‘the principle, involved in Sir Thomas Gresham’s letter to Queen Elizabeth in 1558, that “bad money drives out good”, i.e.,

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