“A penny for your thoughts” – it’s such an annoying idiom. That anyone might attempt to enter into the sanctity of my thoughts for so little! However, I must admit that I’ve used the expression myself, despite the obvious insufficiency of the proffered legal tender. Worse yet, I have sometimes asked, “whacha thinkin?” without offering any consideration at all — as though I were entitled to have another’s thoughts for free. In a world that turns on money, how ever did I develop this mindset?

The unloved penny

In 2007 the Rockefeller Center hosted a display of 100 million pennies collected by public school children. These children obviously loved pennies.  But for many years a surging wave of adults has sought to abolish this humble coin. Grown-ups do not like pennies. Children may save pennies in a jar and use them to buy things. But if an adult puts a penny in a jar, it will stay there forever. Busy people simply throw pennies away.

Most overseas military posts and bases have done away with the penny. You can use pennies to pay, but you will not get them back in change. (By the way, did vending machines or pay phones ever accept pennies?)

Where did the saying come from?

Like so many English idioms, we really don’t know when this one got started. But we can be certain it was in use back when a penny still had some appreciable value. The saying appears in “Four Last Things” written by English humanist scholar Sir Thomas More in 1522. (More, it should be noted, coined the word “utopia,” but wore a hair shirt every day and was beheaded in 1535.)

The saying is most commonly attributed to John Heywood, an English writer of morality plays (and the grandfather of poet John Donne), who published it in a collection of proverbs in 1546. Heywood’s other famous epigraphs include “look ere ye leap” and “no man ought to look a given horse in the mouth.”

Which came first, the idiom or the coin?

“A penny for your thoughts” may have been in our vernacular long before More or Heywood published it. The first pennies were coined by ancient Celts in Britain, although they did not attain the hallmark of Roman-coin quality until sometime in the 1500s. But for all we know, the saying originated centuries before the coin when stone-age savages offered rocks in exchange for their comrades’ opinions.

Adjusting for inflation

But getting back to More and Heywood, in the 1500s a penny had some real value. Straightdope.com estimates that a penny in Heywood’s time was worth about $42.67 in 2001 dollars. If in 1546 you had deposited a penny in a bank account with an interest rate of 2% per annum, the account would have been worth $81.86 in 2001. Increasing the interest rate to 5% would make the account worth more than $43 million.

A reasonable offer for your thoughts

Unless you are a very skilled negotiator, you are not likely to get a reasonable person today to part with anything of value – let alone his or her considered and innermost thoughts — for a penny. Depending on how you look at it, another’s thoughts may cost you somewhere in the range of $42.67 to $43 million. This is not good news. If you need those thoughts anytime soon, an installment loan may be in order.