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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

That is interesting, because Poland has gone through the exact same thing until the Polish zloty was slashed by like 1PLN = 10k PLN, but in my entire life I have never heard people refering to anything using the old denomination like in your example. I wonder why that is, why did people in Romania stick to the old values so much but people in Poland didn't.

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When Canada first adopted a coin for its $1, loads of names were thrown around. I remeber it was about a year, until the name "loonie", named after the bird on it stuck.

When the $2 coin happened, lots of people called it the dubloonie (in most canadian minds, what pirates used). Eventually though, it settled on "twonie".

This sort of cultural change is dynamic, and very influenced by things happening during the transition.

No history book, no movie, etc accurately captures the "word on the street", what the average joe thought at the time.

So, who knows why? Living through the above changes, I simply noticed more and more people settling on one term or another, and eventually.. it just was.

I'm from Poland and I used to hear a lot more old denomination style in countryside up to 10 years ago. Not so much today.

For most people the longest surviving artifact of the denomination was the TV quiz show called "Miliard w rozumie" (A billion in the mind) which had a grand prize of 1 000 000 000 old zł, i.e. 100 000 new zł)

It was a great show, pity it's long gone. Certainly better than shitty entertainment we got now - and at the same time not as pretentious as "Wielka gra".

Interesting. Not even older people? In Romania it's definitely more prevalent among those over 60 say.

Ha, you reminded me that it used to be common in the Netherlands (mainly among those over 40) to convert amounts in Euros to Guilders, mainly to express shock.

"It costs how much? 500 Euro?! That's 1000 guilders!!"

I can confirm that the same happened (and sometimes, nowadays rarely, still happen ) in Italy, the conversion rate from Lira to Euro was 1936.27, so everyone used 2,000 for simplicity, i.e.:

"It costs how much? 500 Euro?! That's 1,000,000 Lire!!"

the conversion was 2002, so only little more than 20 years ago, people 40 and over have grown up "in local money".

I'm trying to remember if people like my grandparents did, but nope, maybe I was too young for it. But it's definitely not something that exists to this age.

It's definitely disappearing in Romanian as well, so perhaps Poland simply did this a longer time ago, or moved on faster (or you and I are living in slightly different bubbles within our respective cultures - one of my grandparents is still alive, so maybe I'm actually only hearing it from her and accidentally generalizing).

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