What Do Some People Put the Dollar Sign After the Amount?

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Well, hello, this is Steve from Dallas.

How are you guys?

Well, hello, Steve.

Hi, Steve. What’s up?

Recently, one of the most aggravating things I think I’ve ever come across, the text message, email, billboard, literally everywhere, is the usage of the money symbol, you know, the dollar sign, in the wrong place.

It’s in the wrong place. It’s on the back end.

And normally, at least when I was being educated early on in life, they taught me if you’re going to use the dollar sign, it should go before the number, i.e., to the left of the number.

Right.

Right.

But for some weird reason, I don’t know why. I don’t know who changed this rule or when it happened.

But for some weird reason, lately, I always see it on the right side of the number.

Always?

Almost always, unless, of course, it’s some professional something or another.

If it’s something that somebody really thought through, then okay, yeah, it’d be in the right place.

But otherwise, it’s like everybody in the world is stupid, and they no longer understand that it’s supposed to go on the left side of the number.

I don’t know what I missed.

Well, A, everybody in the world is not stupid, at least not a –

Thank God.

Or we’re all stupid in our own small ways, but not all in the same way, and that’s why the world is complex.

Let me ask you, do you spend a lot of time on parts of the Internet where there are lots of people from around the world chiming in and having conversations?

Around the world?

I don’t think so.

Not specifically.

Of course.

Yeah, technically, Twitter and Instagram, there are people from other parts of Facebook.

There are people from other parts of the world.

But my circle of friends doesn’t generally include them.

Okay.

Okay.

So you just see these in passing.

It’s not like you’re shopping anyplace in particular online.

Right.

Yeah, you’re not at the grocery store, the Bigly Wiggly or whatever, and seeing prices that way in the store.

No, no, not at all.

Okay, that’s good. That’s good to know.

Do you ever read stuff from France or Quebec?

No, not knowingly, no.

Okay.

The reason I’m asking is because there are parts of the world where their currency symbol does go at the end of the word, and France and Quebec are two of those places.

Wait, are you telling me that you haven’t noticed this trend?

I have noticed it, but I’ve got some other things to say on that.

But I just wanted to say, just in case, some of those cases that you’re seeing out of the vast number, apparently, that you’re noticing may be accounted for by people who started out in another language and haven’t fully mastered the intricacies of putting symbols with numbers in English.

So we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, right?

And then there’s another whole category, and these are the ones I think that are less palatable to me.

These are the people who expect English to be logical and insist because we say $10 that the dollar sign should go after the $10.

And of course, yeah, there are there’s tons of them.

You can Google the Internet. You can find it.

They’re very insistent. And English, of course, isn’t logical and expected to be logical is expecting pigs to sing.

It just doesn’t work. Anyway, so there are a lot of different ways to do this around the world.

The way we do it is by no means universal.

And what’s really interesting, supposedly the reason that we put the dollar sign first is because in the days of written checks,

And I know there are many places where we still do written checks, it would prevent somebody from adding numbers in front of your your your amount.

So if I wrote a 10 and put the dollar sign after, you could easily add another 10 in front of my 10 and suddenly the check would be worth $1,010 instead of just $10.

And so it kind of stops that.

Or a bounce.

So if you – yeah, a bounce.

Yeah, a bounce.

So you do dollar sign 10 period 00.

You can have as many numbers as you want after the 00 and you’re not going to – it’s not going to really matter very much, right?

Right.

But that’s not necessarily true.

I heard that in part of Russia, the former Soviet Union, what they do is they do the currency symbol after the number.

So it’s a euros or robles or whatever.

So it’s a 29.

But they’ll do like what looks like an equal sign or two hyphens in front of the number to prevent you from squeezing in your own extra digit to change the value.

The more I think about it, I’m seeing it more on social media than anything else.

I think it may, because now that I think back on the way I write, I may say $10, if I’m trying to say $10, I’ll write, I need to get the $10 from you guys, period.

But I may say, I may write $10 and then, oh, shoot, I forgot the dollar sign.

Then I have to backspace, backspace, or left, left.

But insert the dollar sign and then continue.

But instead, I think maybe the people are just being lazy and they, oh, shoot, I forgot to put the dollar sign and just stuck it at the back end of it instead of doing the back space.

All right. Well, Steve, I know that a lot of our other listeners have encountered this on the Internet, but maybe somebody who does this, who puts the dollar sign after the number, can give us a really good reason why. All right?

That’d be great.

Okay, cool. Thank you very much for your call. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Have a good night, guys.

Take care.

Thanks, Steve. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Martha, we want to hear from people who do put the dollar sign after.

We want to know why.

Yes.

Like, is it part of your culture?

Were you taught that way?

Does it seem more logical?

Are you just lazy?

Are you lazy?

Are you just doing it because you’re stubborn or you don’t think it matters?

Or let us know.

Words@waywordradio.org.