Calculating thought incomeĪs of 2016, we humans have only scratched the surface of the science of our thought process. So, in our hypothetical situation, we still get one penny (in 2016 dollars) per thought.
Unfortunately for us, today’s idiom remains the same: It has not taken inflation into account. Adjusted for inflation, it would amount to about 1.6 pounds, or $2.50 USD, today. When these texts were written, a penny was actually a considerable sum in England.
Twenty-five years after More’s book, a playwright named John Heywood put together a collection of proverbs he’d heard over the years ( The Proverbs and Epigrams of John Heywood).īuried in its pages, beside gems like “Rome was not built one day” and “all that is well ends well,” was “a peny for your thought.” This text, from 1547, popularized “A penny for your thoughts.” “The Proverbs and Epigrams of John Heywood,” John Heywood, 1547 ’” The very first use in print of the idiom “A penny for your thought(s).” “Four Last Things,” Sir Thomas More, 1522īut it wasn’t really until 1547 that the saying gained any popularity in usage. “As it often happeth that the very face sheweth the mind walking a pilgrimage, in such wise that, not without some note and reproach of such vagrant mind, other folk suddenly say to them, ‘ A penny for your thought. In his text, he uses the saying to refer to a pensive vagrant on a pilgrimage: A brief history of the idiom “A penny for your thoughts”įirst used by English statesman Sir Thomas More in his 1522 book Four Last Things, the idiom “A penny for your thoughts” has retained the same meaning for nearly 500 years. And I couldn’t help but speculate: What if the idiom were economically redeemable not just for musings spoken aloud, but the thousands of rapid-fire internal thoughts that go through my mind each day? If I got a penny for every thought I had, how rich would I be? But the idiom - a penny for your thoughts - lingered. We struck up a conversation, then, two stops later, went our separate ways.
Last weekend, as I was pensively staring into nothingness on the DC metro, a stranger approached me and said, “A penny for your thoughts?”
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