Catchpenny

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Dr. Goodword
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Catchpenny

Postby Dr. Goodword » Tue May 31, 2022 6:08 pm

• catchpenny •


Pronunciation: kæch-pen-i • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun, adjective

Meaning: An item of inferior quality designed to attract customers and encourage quick sales.

Notes: Today's Good Word is a true oddity, a word with a figurative sense, but no literal one. I suppose it might be used for a container designed specifically to catch pennies, but I can't imagine what that would look like and catchpenny has never been used in that sense. Catchphrase is just the opposite: a word with a literal sense but no figurative one.

In Play: Catchpenny is basically a noun: "In 1883 Thomas Edison claimed that the storage battery was a catchpenny, a mechanism for swindling the public by investment firms." The noun is far more often used as an adjective: "Rhoda Book's latest catchpenny novel is well suited for the catchpenny world of commercial publishing."

Word History: Today's Good word is, again, obviously a compound comprising catch + penny. Catch was borrowed from Anglo-French cachier "to catch, capture", a reduction of Vulgar (street) Latin captiare "to seize", also the source of Spanish cazar "to capture, hunt", French chasser "to hunt", and Italian cacciare "to hunt", as in chicken cacciatore "hunter's chicken". Captiare was a spoken variant of Classical Latin captare "to take, hold", based on PIE kap- "to grab", source also of Sanskrit kapati "two handfuls", Albanian kap "grasp", Welsh caeth "captive", German haben "to have" and English have.

Penny remains an etymological mystery. We find evidence of it throughout the Germanic languages, like German Pfennig, Dutch penning, Swedish penning, Danish penge. It must have been borrowed outside PIE for there's no evidence of it in any other IE language. (We should be thankful, yet again, to George Kovac of Miami, Florida, for suggesting today's very unusual Good Word.)
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David Myer
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Re: Catchpenny

Postby David Myer » Wed Jun 01, 2022 5:35 am

Never heard it used in England or Australia. We do have a thing called a loss-leader: a front stall item that sells for less than it costs but which entices people into the shop to buy items with a decent margin.

George Kovac
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Re: Catchpenny

Postby George Kovac » Wed Jun 01, 2022 8:33 am

David,
I never heard of “catchpenny” either until I saw it in print in the NYT describing Elvis Presley’s tacky but successful movies of the 1960s. I love the sound of the word. Yet it is a devastating put-down that sounds so sweet an old lady could say it with a twinkle in her eye. A lot nicer than describing something as, for example, “cheesy hucksterism.” In the choices we make in vocabulary, nuance is all. The word has a twee quality about it that made me assume it was a British usage, but as Dr Goodword’s research reveals, the origins of this portmanteau are unknown.
"Every battle of ideas is fought on the terrain of language." Zia Haider Rahman, New York Times 4/8/2016

Janet Ann Collins
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Re: Catchpenny

Postby Janet Ann Collins » Wed Jun 01, 2022 12:05 pm

Since a penny is small I wonder if the word could have come from the idea of a pinpoint or tiny spot of ink.

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Slava
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Re: Catchpenny

Postby Slava » Wed Jun 01, 2022 2:56 pm

Or perhaps the idea of taking care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.

Welcome to the Agora, Janet. Looking forward to seeing more. Enjoy!
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David Myer
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Re: Catchpenny

Postby David Myer » Sat Jun 04, 2022 8:56 am

This brings to mind yet another gem of wisdom from my late father. His paternal advice was to take care of the pounds and leave the bloody fools to worry about the pennies.


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