Puzzle Description:

Penny wise and pound foolish

#1: Scott (mcencheese) on Jun 9, 2025

pretty sure that's a British idiom.

You got it, Scott. The pound sterling is the UK's base monetary unit, and since the decimalization of British currency more than 50 years ago there have been 100 pence (plural of penny) in a pound. Before that there were 12 pence in a shilling, which no longer exists, and 20 shillings in a pound. If the idiom were American I suppose it would be "penny wise and dollar foolish."

Yes, of course you are correct. We use it along with "in for a penny, in for a pound" here in the USA too. I didn't want to change the title of the whole series to just Idioms.

Maybe I should change the idiom to "Dime wise, dollar foolish". Was there a Dimewise the Clown?

And now they are talking about phasing out the penny. How sad.

Pennies and I have never seen eye to eye, little worthless bullies! I'm happy they're being given the boot!

We got rid of pennies here in Canada quite a few years ago. I haven't missed them at all. Now they're considering axing the nickel, too.

Here in the USA, they charge for gasoline to the tenth of a cent. $4.29 9/10 per gallon what's up with that?

Just a way to squeeze an extra 15 cents out of us on a fill-up :P

Here in the US you buy a pound of potatoes and it's 1 lb.

Jota, are you implying that weights and measures are less rigorously enforced here in Trump Can Go Fuck Himself Land? Cause I can assure, that's not the case.

I apologise to you all. I know this is a non political, have fun site. I'll try my best not to respond to flagrant provocations in the future. I love you guys.

???

Love it! You captured that scary guy perfectly!

I took Jota's comment as more, this may be a British saying, but we have "pound" too but in a different context." For me, personally, I thought it was an interesting observation because I've never given the saying much thought and just understood the intent (probably from context clues), but given that more common meaning for "pound" here, I could fully imagine someone hearing the saying and thinking it might mean that someone might be good at finance (or making financial decisions) but that might not matter (or matters less) if they are bad at (or don't take care in) measuring (or valuation). I don't know, maybe she didn't mean that, but still hard to take it as political :)

Not political at all! Just the fact that the word pound = LB for libra.

I take the expression to mean that if you pay to close attention to the small stuff, you miss the big picture.

The interwebs tell me it means "Prudent and thrifty with small amounts of money, but wasteful with large amounts."

As soon as I'd completed the top 10 rows, I guessed the character and the idiom ^_^

Goto next topic

You must register and log in to be able to participate in this discussion.