Coin Nudity
I will finish the discussion on tags and classification, but I need to tell this story first: I went to Home Depot yesterday evening to pick up a couple more Rubbermaid storage bins to hold the new Christmas decorations we bought this year. Three bins came to $22.45, so I pulled out the requisite bills, plus four dimes and a nickel. The high-school girl working the register handed the shiny new nickel back to me and asked me if I had one of the older types. The newer types, she said, were being "caught".
I assumed she meant that they got stuck in some sort of coin counter, and grinned as I pulled an older coin from my pocket. I asked her how often the new nickels got caught, and it was her turn to look puzzled. "No, I meant the government is catching them and pulling them out of circulation. You can see how the buffalo is male."
The nickel in question is new in 2005, and one a few people may not even have seen yet. It replaces Montecello with a buffalo, similar (if in lower relief) to the buffalo on the back of the nickel between 1913 and 1937. I think it's a hideous coin, looking as though it were a quarter (or some larger coin) stamped out on a nickel planchet. But my brief lookover had failed to disclose that the buffalo was...er...male.
The girl then told me that she had heard that the male buffalo nickels were worth $3 each, and clearly thought she was doing me a favor. (I do appreciate that impulse, and thanked her for it.) But it seemed preposterous to me, since pulling coins from circulation costs the government hugely.
On the other hand, we're talking government, where money is no object and dumbness is a sacred tradition. So I looked it up and found the expose on Snopes. Urban legend, spread via email, like most of them. The buffalo on the earlier nickel, after a model named Black Diamond from the Central Park Zoo, is even better hung than the poor thing on the 2005 nickel, and I don't recall anyone complaining about him.
The US Mint has had problems with coin nudity before. The best known case is the 1916-1917 Type I Standing Liberty Quarter, a gorgeous coin that was still in spotty circulation when I was a kid, though the ones I saw were so beat up and worn that you could barely tell what the design was supposed to represent. When it was new, the coin caused a furor because the sculptor had left one breast exposed, toga-style, in deference to the iconically bare-breasted French figure Liberty. Never mind that the sculptor had left off her nipple; he was forced to do some coverup work for the 1918 year, which he did by enclosing the offending organ in chain mail. Ouch.
Some people clearly need a life, or maybe a book of crossword puzzles. I'm glad the furor over our new buffalo nickel is phony; I'd hate to see the poor thing in chain-mail piddle-pants.