Silver Coins in Popular Culture
A silver coin or coins sometimes are placed under the mast or in the keel of a ship as a good luck charm. This tradition probably originated with the Romans. The tradition continues in modern times, for example, officers of USS New Orleans placed 33 coins heads up under her foremast and mainmast before she was launched in 1933 and USS Higgins, commissioned in 1999, had 11 coins specially selected for her mast stepping.
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Famous quotes containing the words silver, coins, popular and/or culture:
“‘A Shape all light, which with one hand did fling
Dew on the earth, as if she were the dawn,
And the invisible rain did ever sing
‘A silver music on the mossy lawn;”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“No Time, spoke the clocks, no God, rang the bells,
I drew the white sheet over the islands
And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“O, popular applause! what heart of man
Is proof against thy sweet, seducing charms?”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“... we’ve allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyond fifty, sixty, or seventy—all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics—many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)