Face
Seigniorage is the difference between the face value of a coin and the cost to mint it. I just read that word in an Op-Ed piece. Seignior is from middle French and with -age means something about the right of the greater satraps of the Middle Ages to coin money. It recalls for me the use of Señor for Lord in the Spanish Book of Common Prayer and maybe with Caesar’s profile on the coin Jesus flipped for options.
English has close to 300,000 words when you don’t count the ones dictionaries call obsolete. Teenagers on the younger side are said to have about 10,000. Ten years ago, they had 25,000. Something other than our usual illiteracy is awry. I’ve known people who deliberately learn a new word every day to increase their vocabulary. I tried that, but forgot them about as soon as I learned them. There’s something about seigniorage, though, that intrigues me.
It’s like what would you call the difference between the face value of a human being and the cost to “mint” one? I read somewhere the other day that the average cost for having a baby is $35,000. I don’t know what that includes, mostly hospital and obgyn, I suspect, but it sure sounds prohibitive. Taking it for openers plus the cost of raising one of us up to age twenty or so might be effective birth control if anybody would pay attention on the way to running up the bill. But I doubt they would.
The ex-Veep said the other day when talking about WMDs and safety and the like that he wasn’t into vengeance. Perhaps not, but he seemed to have made a lot more of the 3,000 of us killed on 9/11 than the many more thousands of the militaries and collaterals and billions that have been spent so far on what often seems from the beginning a lot like getting even. This, he never mentioned.
Of course, the face value of a human being and the cost to mint one is of no comparison with coinage. It is precious and finally interminable, for that face value is for all to see. It is the remarkable and most winsome face of God.