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Vent: found out a 16 penny nail is not 16 pennies of anything
Was reading through an old framing book at the shop and it said penny sizes go back to how much 100 nails cost in England back in the day, so a 16d nail was 16 pennies per hundred. Spent 15 minutes trying to figure out if that math even works anymore and my boss just laughed and told me to go cut studs. What other trade terms are we using that don't mean a thing anymore? I need to know so I can bug him about it all week.
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andrew_miller9015d ago
The penny thing actually still kinda tracks if you think about it as a price index, not a literal penny count. Old books list 16d as the size, so the number never was meant to match today's cost. My favorite dead term is "horsepower" on a nail gun box, since nobody's measuring horses anymore.
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