Barbelith Underground > Conversation

Although the first use of "ruination" remains opaque in the absence at this desk of an etymological dictionary, it is certainly derived from "ruin" rather than the reverse, "ruin" itelf being derived from the Old French "ruine", and thence the Latin "ruina", both meaning a collapse or falling down. Entering English in the 14 century, "ruin" took over the sense of a derelict building and ultimately the associated meanings of financial or moral collapse. It sounds to me more like a 17th century coining to distinguish the state of being a ruin from the act of making a ruin, but this question must remain unanswered for now.

More pertinently, how tempting is an oddsmaking of dollars to doughnuts? In my local Pret à Manger, a doughnut costs 60 pence, which is to say around a dollar. These are, admittedly, on the upper end of doughnuts, being baked rather than fried and thus aimed at a health-conscious, middle-class consumer. The fried doughnuts available on Birghton's surviving pleasure pier are considerably less expensive, being essentially the product of a mechanical process where doughnut mix is dropped into hot fat and then dusted with sugar. However, the ambiguity over the cost of doughnuts, relating not only to the type of doughnut but also to the location of the act of exchange, is only a part of a broader confusion, augmented by the question of which dollar is being offered as returb. A Canadian dollar, for instance, would presumably buy fewer doughnuts than a US dollar, assuming the doughnuts to be of comparable quality.

You might think it somewhat odd that the US adopted the dollar as its unit of currency, it being an abbreviation for Joachimsthaler and German imperial holdings in North America being unimpressive. However, "dollar" was also the term used by the British to desribe the Spanish coinage produced in the silver mines of Mexico and Peru and widely used throughout the Americas, and so "dollar" was proposed by Thomas Jefferson as the name of the unit of currency on the grounds that it was not an English currency unit, but was a widely-understood term for currency.

None of which helps us with the escalating cost of doughnuts since the origins of the phrase in the 19th century. "Dollars to dimes" would both lock in the relationship of value, and would also identify the currency on offer, but one might wonder why, when the stake and return exist in such an invariant relationship, one would not simply plump for the universal "10-1 odds".

Digressions