Talk:Legal tender

Legal tender is a verb, not a noun.

As documented in Viera's book, "Pieces of Eight", US currency notes originally said, "This note is a legal tender for 1 dollar of gold." Meaning that the note was considered to be a tender by the Treasury of 1 dollar worth of physical gold.

In the 20th century, when the Treasury started moving away from redeemable notes, they dropped the second half of the sentence and changed it to "This note is legal tender" - creating a new meaning of "tender" as a noun.

The definition given in this article here is therefore not accurate.


 * I am all for getting definitions straight and pointing out the specifics of Austrian definitions as compared to mainstream or common uses of terms. Whatever the differences in meaning though, it seems to me that "legal tender" is nowadays used as a noun (see e.g. ) and I'm not sure it was actually used as a verb. In any case, exploring the usage of term over the course of history would be very interesting. Pestergaines (talk) 10:40, 2 October 2013 (MSK)