a penny for your thoughts? by Caleb M. '27

I think the saying “a penny for your thoughts?” is really rather interesting.

The saying was coined (no pun intended) in the 1520s by one Sir Robert More in his ‘Four Last Things’: “It often happeth, that the very face sheweth the mind walking a pilgrimage, in such wise that other folk sodainly say to them ‘a penny for your thought.’”

Sir More was an English lawyer, judge, social philosopher, and author as well as Lord Chancellor to King Henry VIII. After refusing to recognize Henry as the Supreme Head of the Church of England (and acknowledge the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon), More was convicted of treason and executed in 1535. He was canonised as a martyr in 1935 by Pope Pius XI and, in 2000, was declared the patron saint of statesmen and politicians by Pope John Paul II.

The only part of this brief paraphrasis of the beginning of Sir Thomas More’s Wikipedia page, however, that is relevant for this blog is the first descriptive word: English. Because, if More was English, then the “penny” he was referring to must be the old penny, or more formally the British Pre-Decimal Penny.⁠01 Before 1971, British coinage was divided into the penny, the shilling, and the pound; 20 pence made up a shilling, and 12 shillings constituted a pound. In 1971 this was changed to a decimal system: the shilling was abolished and the pound was divided into 100 "new pence."

After some searching, I found an inflation calculator for British pence from the Bank of England, which stated that from 1522 to now the change in value for the the pound (and, thus, all derivative coinage) was 83,297.5%. That means that the British Pre-Decimal Penny, which was 1/240th of a pound, had an equivalent purchasing power in 1522 to £3.47 today, or $4.73.

Let’s think about the implications of that. When Sir More first suggested the idea of one offering “a penny for your thoughts,” he was essentially equating one’s thought with 5 bucks. Hey, I’d tell anyone my thoughts for 5 bucks.⁠02 kind of like i'm doing right here actually It makes it seem like, in 1522, thoughts were quite the worthwhile thing.

What I’m really trying to focus on here are the implications of offering a penny for one’s thoughts. In 1522, a thought—or, more particularly, the act of sharing what someone was thinking—was worth something actually particularly significant: per my investigation, it had the same value as a few pounds of cheese, or 2 dozen eggs. At this point, a penny actually means something, and thus the act of offering one to someone meant that you cared about what you were getting back: in this case, one’s thoughts. To see inside someone’s mind, or opening your own up to someone else, was a meaningful (if cheap) activity.

This really starkly contrasts what a penny for your thoughts might mean today. These days, when someone throws the phrase out, it invokes a sense of care in spite of the near-worthlessness of the coin it references. If a penny could purchase two dozen eggs in 1522, it can comparitively purchase 0.03 eggs today. Our thoughts are worth but 3% of an egg; the past 500 years have devalued the mind so. People say it out of custom now more than because the penny itself doesn’t really mean anything.

It’s not just that the price that’s different though—I imagine that the meaning itself has changed somehow too. It wouldn’t be the same to go up to someone you’re hanging out with and ask them, “Fiver for your thoughts?” Like, sure, that’s partly because that’s not actually a saying. But it’s also because you wouldn’t give someone $5 to know what they were thinking. I mean, be honest. I just turned to the 13 other bloggers (+Ceri) in the room with me right now and not a single one of them said they would be willing to hand over $5 to someone⁠03 "If it was The Unabomber, maybe." -Ellie they were casually chatting with just to hear what they may or may not actually be thinking about. Maybe it’s because we’re way more attached to our money, or maybe we’ve become so much less interested in what others are thinking, or maybe we’re thinking so much more these days with the rise of the internet and social media and so on, or maybe it’s something else entirely, but one thing is for certain: a thought in 1522 seems to have been worth way more than a thought is now. 

Until, that is, November 12th, 2025.

On this fateful Wednesday in my Junior fall, I learned some heartbreaking news: the American Penny was dead. The last one was minted that afternoon in Philadelphia, and it was never to produced for general circulation again. It had become imprcatical—pennies were ¢3.69 to produce each, costing more than they were representatively worth. The very symbol of monetary worth, icon of numismatics, zinger in zinc and copper, was gone. 

And, honestly, nobody really cares. How long would it take you to find a penny right now? If you saw a penny on the street, would you pick it up? At this point, the world is so saturated with pennies that are literally worth negative three cents that they just don’t mean anything to us. 

But. With the discontinuation of the penny, something’s changed in what it means to offer one in exchange for the thoughts of your friends or acquaintances. It’s not just some nothingburger pressing of a president and some shield⁠04 I liked the memorial better anymore—it’s a symbol of archaism, of a time past. It’s a relic of a world we’ve found ourselves locked out of by the keys of time. And as time goes on, they’ll only get rarer and rarer, more and more lost to clutter, to inflation, to the irrelevance of a system that moves on if you don’t keep up. A penny will be a story we tell our children, our grandchildren; it’ll sound like paying a nickel for a scoop of ice cream at the corner store. A penny will be less and less a coin and more and more a fable.

And, if the meaning of the penny changes, then just like it did from 1522 to now, the meaning of “a penny for your thoughts” will necessarily change too. I won’t just be offering you a worthless lump of zinc; I’ll be reaching into the past to hand you a piece of history in exchange for a window into your mind. I’ll be giving you something rare, something that isn’t made anymore, something frozen in time. Your thoughts aren’t worth $5, or 3% of an egg, or anything as easily quantifiable: they’re meaningful beyond the value we attribute to them. They are intrinsically valuable as a function of how they exist as a piece of the world around you. Thoughts aren’t worthless, they’re timeless. They’re not valueless, they’re invaluable. And with its death, the penny finds its rebirth here—it gains that same status as an unforgettable module of the world around us. 

In 50 years, when I offer “a penny for your thoughts,” what might that mean? I invoke something rare—and, in the eyes of the world, thus valuable—for a peek into your mind. And in that, it’s more than just a $5 bill, because that’s around everywhere. Instead, it means that I’d be willing to search deeply to find an object of which there has not been a new one in half a century for the chance to step into your world and try to see the world how you do. Your thoughts are worth so much more than just a coin, or a piece of a dollar: it’s like I’m saying that it’s worth the time that it might take to get my hands on a penny for that opportunity. And weirdly, I think that’s pretty beautiful.

Maybe that won’t happen. Maybe it’s a pipe dream and the penny will fade into an ultimate status of irrelevancy, and along with it the saying at the center of this blog will disappear too, or perhaps become as anachronistic as Yankee Doodle’s macaroni hat. But there’s a chance that it sticks around, and a penny finally takes on a mantle of equivalent worth to the perpetual exchange rate of 1 thought. By shedding its simply monetary value, there’s the slimmest chance that the penny, as a beautiful modicum of time immemorial and a tile that takes significant effort to find, finally rises to the occasion of the saying around it. And by god, the linguist and the romantic in me hope it does.

So, I’ve got to ask: a relic for your reflections? A memory for a memory?

A penny for your thoughts?