Redundancy All Over Again

One Theory for the Evolution of Man

I once infamously had an argument with a fellow about his use of the dollar sign. Seems he'd written the price of a product on a website, thus: $50.00USD. I pointed out that the dollar sign ($)  means United States of America currency, the dollar, so the USD suffix was redundant.

"But," he began knowledgeably, "New Zealand and Australia use the dollar symbol, too, so the USD suffix is necessary to remove ambiguity about which currency's price is being shown."

"That's all fine and well," say I, but what I mean is that the dollar symbol LITERALLY means the UNITED STATES.The $ symbol is an abstraction of an overlay of the two first letters 'U' and 'S' of the words 'United' and 'States'. "

(When I was in grade school learning to write, we were taught this theory and how to construct the dollar sign by first writing the letter U, then writing the letter S over the top of the U, writing upon that hugely-spaced, lined paper meant for the hand of a child.  Then we erased the bottom curve of the U to leave two vertical lines through the S, a form of the symbol that was still most prevalently used until a few years later, when a single vertical line became the more common, simpler form.  As with everything, there are competing views regarding the $ symbol's evolutionary path.)

I continued, "When another country uses the symbol, it's only THEN that disambiguation is required by using THEIR country abbreviation as a suffix or prefix; e.g., NZ$50.00 to represent fifty New Zealand dollars. The United States is the DEFAULT meaning of the dollar sign, needing no further clarification."

 "What do you mean by default?" he said.

 Sigh. I would never succeed in convincing him that his method actually caused ambiguity rather than prevented it.