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:
“‘Guess now who holds thee?’—‘Death,’ I said. But,
there,
The silver answer rang, . . . ‘Not Death, but Love.’”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“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)
“If they have a popular thought they have to go into a darkened room and lie down until it passes.”
—Kelvin MacKenzie (b. 1946)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)