Little Sense

When I was a boy, not so long ago, there was a thing called the cent sign. It looked like this: ¢

It was the dollar sign's little brother, and lived on comic books covers and in newspaper advertisements and on pay phones and wherever anything was being sold for less than a buck. It was a popular punctuation symbol—no question mark, or dollar sign, certainly, but just behind the * in popularity, and I daresay well ahead of #, &, and the now Internet-hot @. It owned an unshifted spot on the typewriter keyboard, just to the right of the semicolon, and was part of every third grader's working knowledge.

In the late 1990s, you don't see many cent signs. Why? Because hardly anything costs less than a dollar anymore? Actually, the demise of the cent sign has little to do with inflation, and everything to do with computers. And therein lies a tale....

Without a cent key in front of them, writers of books, newspapers, magazines, and advertisements made do without. And over time, $0.19 began to look like the right way to say 19¢. In another few years the cent sign will look as alien as those strange S's our forefathers were using when they wrote the constitution.

Thanks nef's blog!