3 ms·

Note: article is from 1862 :)

kensai 10y ago
We need this in the title! ;) From the article: "The rebel Congress has passed a law, authorizing the issue of five millions of dollars in copper coins, of the denominations of five, ten and twenty-five cents. " The REBEL congress!! :D
MentallyRetired 10y ago
I have to admit, I got all the way to "hitherto" before I figured it out.
- LyndsySimon 10y ago
  I clicked the link thinking "WTF? Didn't Congress do this during the Civil War in an attempt to prevent people from using postage as currency when the CS Dollar began to inflate? A random bit of trivia - the CSA never issued coins. There were two attempts - a cent and a half dollar - but neither made it past the "proof" stage: https://www.pcgs.com/News/Confederate-States-Of-America-Coinage https://www.pcgs.com/News/Confederate-States-Of-America-Coin...
- logicallee 10y ago
  Can you give more information? The style doesn't seem even close to the style anyone would write in today - did you think they were like kind of pretending to write in this old-fashioned way, like making fun of old-fashioned writing? did you think it's humor/satire?
forinti 10y ago
Took me a while to notice this. If it were Portuguese, I would immediately notice it. It seems to me that English hasn't changed as much as Portuguese has. This is what sounded old to me: "very gross wrong upon the people, in thus repudiating its own stamps".
- schoen 10y ago
  The biggest change here might be "gross" which is mostly used today in the sense of 'disgusting' (and in a somewhat technical and formal sense of 'complete', 'entire', or 'coarse') but used to mean "large, great" (strangely it looks like "great" is cognate with German "groß", yet English "gross" isn't). Also "wrong upon" has become rarer than "wrong against" or "wrong to", "the people" has become rarer in this context than "the public" or has different connotations, and "thus" has become somewhat archaic in senses other than 'hence, consequently'. Maybe there are even other things here that I've overlooked. Notably, Portuguese had multiple spelling reforms since 1862, while English has never had any (which is not to say that English spelling has never changed, but there have never been effective government decisions to change it abruptly). That probably makes Portuguese from that era look more visually distinct from contemporary Portuguese. For example, the enacting clause of the Lei Áurea, 26 years later than this text, says A Princeza Imperial Regente em Nome de Sua Magestade o Imperador o Senhor D. Pedro II, Faz saber a todos os subditos do Imperio que a Assembléa Geral Decretou e Ella sanccionou a Lei seguinte (differences from current Portuguese orthography italicized) By contrast, there are approximately no differences in spelling between this article and present-day standard English, but that doesn't mean that all of the vocabulary is used the same way. For the Portuguese, it's easy to be struck right away by the fact that words are no longer spelled the same way...

We need this in the title! ;) From the article: "The rebel Congress has passed a law, authorizing the issue of five millions of dollars in copper coins, of the denominations of five, ten and twenty-five cents. " The REBEL congress!! :D

MentallyRetired 10y ago

I have to admit, I got all the way to "hitherto" before I figured it out.

LyndsySimon 10y ago
I clicked the link thinking "WTF? Didn't Congress do this during the Civil War in an attempt to prevent people from using postage as currency when the CS Dollar began to inflate? A random bit of trivia - the CSA never issued coins. There were two attempts - a cent and a half dollar - but neither made it past the "proof" stage: https://www.pcgs.com/News/Confederate-States-Of-America-Coinage https://www.pcgs.com/News/Confederate-States-Of-America-Coin...
logicallee 10y ago
Can you give more information? The style doesn't seem even close to the style anyone would write in today - did you think they were like kind of pretending to write in this old-fashioned way, like making fun of old-fashioned writing? did you think it's humor/satire?

forinti 10y ago

Took me a while to notice this. If it were Portuguese, I would immediately notice it. It seems to me that English hasn't changed as much as Portuguese has. This is what sounded old to me: "very gross wrong upon the people, in thus repudiating its own stamps".

schoen 10y ago
The biggest change here might be "gross" which is mostly used today in the sense of 'disgusting' (and in a somewhat technical and formal sense of 'complete', 'entire', or 'coarse') but used to mean "large, great" (strangely it looks like "great" is cognate with German "groß", yet English "gross" isn't). Also "wrong upon" has become rarer than "wrong against" or "wrong to", "the people" has become rarer in this context than "the public" or has different connotations, and "thus" has become somewhat archaic in senses other than 'hence, consequently'. Maybe there are even other things here that I've overlooked. Notably, Portuguese had multiple spelling reforms since 1862, while English has never had any (which is not to say that English spelling has never changed, but there have never been effective government decisions to change it abruptly). That probably makes Portuguese from that era look more visually distinct from contemporary Portuguese. For example, the enacting clause of the Lei Áurea, 26 years later than this text, says A Princeza Imperial Regente em Nome de Sua Magestade o Imperador o Senhor D. Pedro II, Faz saber a todos os subditos do Imperio que a Assembléa Geral Decretou e Ella sanccionou a Lei seguinte (differences from current Portuguese orthography italicized) By contrast, there are approximately no differences in spelling between this article and present-day standard English, but that doesn't mean that all of the vocabulary is used the same way. For the Portuguese, it's easy to be struck right away by the fact that words are no longer spelled the same way...