Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

> Merkel was in bed with some green guy named Benjamin.

What a misguided reference. Last I checked no Euro note or coin has anyone called "Benjamin" on them, in fact they don't have people on them at all, they're places.

Americans really need to stop using the Benjamin/Jackson/etc thing online to describe money, it isn't a clever reference even in relation to US currency and just comes across as ignorant when used to describe other country's monetary instruments (such as this case).

View on HN

I actually misunderstood the entire statement because of this. I thought this was happening because of a politician from the green party and was going over green party politicians to figure out whom could possible me meant. I live in the US since 8 years and still misunderstood it.

I'm not the only one that tought exactly the same, at least.

Friendly tip: You need to look at the different uses of "since" and "for" in English.

Yeah, thanks. I know the difference in theory, but reliably mess it up. If more people were to call me on it like you did, it would probably be fixed by now. My American wife never tells me these things and just confirms it when someone else is so nice to point is out. :(

> I live in the US since 8 years and still misunderstood it.

in particular it's hard to tell whether you mean 'since I were eight years old' vs 'for a span of eight years'

also, a native speaker would probably use tense such as "I have lived", so casually, "I've lived in the US for 8 years and still misunderstood it."

and noone ever uses whom, but you probably used it correctly

ps you typoed 'possibly be' and 'it'

"no one" is two words, though, confusingly, for all intents and purposes it's a single unit, grammatically.

Exactly. ignorance of politics backfires both ways.

That was my thought as well.

They're not even places on the banknotes. It's bridges that don't really exist* and only represent different building styles throughout the last hundreds of years. Some coins have kings/queens on them.

(* replicas of all the bridges were built in the Netherlands)

> they're places

Not even real. Fictional arches & bridges.

They are intended to represent historical building styles of Europe without bias to any particular country. They used to be fictional, then someone built them because they wanted to prove a point.

And that, precisely, is why we can't have nice things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com