Today an internet friend said
Caught myself quoting someone "ninety quid" for something, and it got me thinking about what point quids become pounds. You never really hear somebody say "that'll be one thousand eight hundred and twenty four quid" or whatever do you
This is such a great question! It made my little linguistics-undergrad heart so happy. Because we all have a pretty refined and regulated internal sense of the languages we speak well, but almost all of it is subconscious. Because the language features we pay attention to and have particular associations with (like saying "wooder" for water) are just the tip of the iceberg. We follow patterns all the time but don't know that we have developed those patterns.
Especially in relatively informal language use -- because we may be taught how to speak/write "properly" but no one tells us overtly how to talk to our peers or how to play with language. That stuff isn't valued as highly -- sometimes that's even treated as if it's in opposition to "proper" language, like fifteen years ago when old people worried that txt spk would render students literally unable to spell anything in the standard way for their schoolwork.
But yeah. No one ever taught me when to say "pounds" and when to say "quid," and I'd never thought about it before, but when I saw this question I immediately
1) recognized the distinction between naming amounts of money as either "pounds" and "quid" as something familiar to me (even though I didn't start using the word quid until my 20s, and at first was told not to use it because it sounded wrong in my accent!
and
2) had an idea already that felt plausible for what the distinction might be
Other respondents had their own theories -- most taking the question at face value and replying with what they thought the cutoff is where quid changes to pounds, like "over a thousand" or "over two thousand" -- but I of course had to problematize the very assumptions of the question itself.
I said that I think there's kind of a cutoff (I said 100) but also that any round number can be quid: not just their "ninety quid" quote but, say, "nine thousand quid" or "90 million quid." Sentences like "he spent almost nine thousand quid on his car" or "the government has wasted 90 million quid on this" seem perfectly fine to me. My (completely off-the-cuff) theory is that a round number can indicate a certain amount of informality. I guess that I think round numbers feel less formal? There's the potential for a "this is close enough" vibe that makes it suit the informal register of "quid."
I wonder (though now I'm thinking about it too much and can't trust myself) if there's an difference of emphasis there too? "The government wasted a million quid" feels more forceful to me than "the government wasted a million pounds." Maybe this is a phonetics thing? Quid has the sharp plosives to begin and end on, and only that little vowel in the middle. Pounds ends in that lingering fricative, and the vowel is so open and feels longer to say because it's a diphthong. (That's all speculation, I don't know phonetics at all.)
What do you think? If you talk about quid and pounds (or dollars and bucks, or any currency that has a common slang term), do you feel like there is a pattern your brain uses to choose one word over the other? What's the pattern?
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