MALCOLM Wheatman, of Kendal, laments the loss of a disappeared language.

BEFORE 1971 who would have believed they could get nostalgic about pounds, shillings and pence? Many above a certain age certainly do.

At the outset, one of those people was heard to say, facetious or not, 'Why didn't the government wait until all the old folk were dead?'

But, in 1971, the Government's decimalisation killed off a folk language that had endured much bargain haggling in market places.

The spoken Tuppence and Thruppence, a Tanner, a Bob, Half-a-dollar (half-a-crown/two-and-sixpence, which probably came in with the wartime influx of American films and Americans themselves, s=Latin solidus) all disappeared, but the word 'Quid' (£=Latin librae) remains intact, if not its value.

Sixpence in old market slang was '-a-kick', ie. 'two-and-a-kick' for Half-a-crown.

Items costing an exact Pound were still cheapened by the smallest amount, so 19/11 (nineteen shillings and eleven pence) became 99p.

Penny, the copper unit (d=Latin denari) was rarely used, and became known as 'p' (pence), at first off-putting for some, now part of the established base-ten system.

Grammar seemed as if the early copper had been designed by someone unacquainted with plurals, so the humble smaller-sized penny for a time became the oddly sounding one New Pence.

With the disappearance of three-column pounds, shillings and pence, the Government assured people that base-ten reckoning, being uniform, would be simpler like the whole of the metric system, although costly mistakes have been made in medicine, confusing milligrams and micrograms.

People, who had grown up with £.s.d. and suddenly told it was complicated, would probably disagree.

It seemed odd that, with this 'simpler' system, came tills that calculated base-ten money for those who had previously relied on their own mental three-column arithmetic.