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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

"The pound won’t be round for much longer" is a pretty awful tagline, I'm not sure they realised what this sounds like...

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It's a play on words. Of course they realised.

I know that, but I'm not sure they realised it's a BAD play on words

Why is it bad?

edit: oh yeah I see it now

I read it with the meaning “the pound won’t be in use for long” at first which seemed rather incongruous. I was wondering whether there was something I had missed about happenings with respect to brexit (I’m Australian, never been to the UK). It took me a while to interpret it as “the shape of the pound is changing from a circle to a dodecahedron”.

If it meant that, I'd expect it to be:

"The pound won’t be around for much longer"

so the original sentence is sort of a pun. Maybe "around" is a local use of English.

Just like “until” is commonly shortened “till”, “around” is commonly shortened as “round”.

Thanks to the "you see what you expect to see" effect, it took me until someone pointed out the pun before I realized the word was "round" and not "around".

I know this doesn't affect your point, but it's interesting: "till" is older than "until".

http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=until

Fortunately the domain name is rather less ambiguous and primed me for the weak pun. I'm ... glad(?) that the wordplay survived the marketeering sessions and civil service vetting.

BTW: dodecahedron is the solid object, dodecagon is the 12-sided polygon. D&D style dice as currency would be pretty awesome but it might make it difficult to resolve dilemmas using pocket change.

I don't expect we'll be changing to the Euro any time soon.

The new coin is still called "pound", so indeed the statement makes no sense.

It won't be round though, it'll be dodecahedral. It makes perfect sense, but has two possible meanings.

Yes he knows; he's saying that the pun is a bit shit because only one of the two meanings is actually true.

It's a pun - the new coin is not round/circular, it's got shave edges.

The old pound coin was round. The new pound coin is 12-sided. Thus, the pound coin will still be around but it won't be round much longer.

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