April 30, 2012: "You May Not Find"

Author:
C. Sloan

Concept:
I don’t know if it is due to the Gold Rush, or possibly Joe Montana, but whenever the numbers 4 and 9 appear next to each other, someone immediately shouts out "49er!", as did our guest author when penning this week’s ad.

Whatever the case, it worked for us, creating a neatly alliterative caption that rolls off the tongue and suitably highlights this hard-to-improve-upon 1849 Dollar.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
Our first attempt this week was "Divine ’49.", a caption so pedestrian that it was instantly rejected by our team of judges and rightly so.

A reaction that was still better than that put forth for "You will not be nonplussed abut this coin.", an ill advised attempt to highlight the NGC + grade by using a word virtually guaranteed to confuse the majority of our readership. Especially since the actual meaning of nonplussed (perplexed, confused) differs greatly from the way most people use it (unimpressed, indifferent).

Leading us to conclude that a caption requiring someone to use an incorrect definition of a word isn’t likely to be very successful, so we scuttled that idea and went for C. Sloan’s version in the final ad.