June 29, 2009: "Legal Tender"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
We’ve used this idea in descriptions of Latin American silver issues on our site countless times for four important reasons:

1. It’s true.

2. It makes very clear why pieces like this one are of interest to collectors of early American coins.

3. The amazingly late date of 1857 surprises people.

4. Frankly, it sounds cool.

Based on all of that, we figured that sometime during the last several years we must have used it in an earlier CRO ad caption, but a quick perusal of our Ad Archive confirmed that we hadn’t (unless the Archive is wrong, and I do not think it is).

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
I wish I could tell you that we had dozens of clever alternatives, including at least one which employed a play on the word ‘Pistareen’, and which was extremely funny and slightly inappropriate, but the fact is that we had a grand total of one alternative for this ad and it was very similar to the final version:

"Legal tender in America until 1857."

But we decided ‘United States’ sounded better.