Pounds, pence and quid

I've been meaning to write this for a while now, but my brain kept getting in the way and making it longer. However, there's a Brit Picking post at paperpushers at the moment, so I thought this was a good chance to start again. I'm going to be making a few of these, and they'll all be under the Britpick tag.

The best British English guide I know of is here, and I heartily recommend it as a first stop for pretty much everything.

Let me make a general disclaimer here: I grew up in East London and have lived in Oxford (SE England) for all my adult life. Regional slang varies enormously in the UK. Really, really massively, sometimes from street to street. So this is my perspective as a Southerner. Other regions will vary.

I'm also using 'quid' to illustrate a wider point about the way Brits use slang. This isn't unique to us, of course, but it's the only point of view I'm qualified to talk from!

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One mistake I've seen in quite a few Merlin fics now is using 'quid' in the wrong context. Trying to pin down exactly how its used is surprisingly tricky, but here are some good rules of thumb:

Very, very, very roughly speaking, if you would't say 'buck' don't use 'quid'. That's NOT universal, but if you're in a hurry, it more or less works.

~ In general, if in doubt, use pound. Even people who use quid will use pound as well in a lot of contexts.

~ If you are talking about the physical objects of money, ie the actual coins and notes, then they are pounds. It's a one pound coin, a five pound note (always note, never bill). We say fiver and tenner for five and ten pound notes, then twenties and fifties. Those are all the notes we have. Below five, we have one and two pound coins.

~ Quid is always a whole number or an approximation. Something costs four pounds ninety-nine or about five quid. Never five quid ninety nine.

~ I've never actually seen this, but just in case, quid is the plural as well as the singular - one quid, two quid, five quid etc. Not five quids.

~ Quid is mostly likely to be used in a context where the characters are young or working class.

That last one is the one that needs some expansion, especially in a Merlin context. My linguist friends will almost certainly start headdesking at this point, but hopefully this is close enough to the truth to be useful without being confusing. Unfortunately, this is where it gets kind of long, ( so I put it under a cut, because here's where I start to talk about code-switching and get a bit carried away. )

Okay, that's quite enough on that. Next up: Universities. And I'm also taking requests :)