September 25, 1997

pin money

A friend recently wrote the expression "pen money," which I'm sure should be "pin money," but I can't find the expression in any of my dictionaries. I have the idea that it refers to the (relatively small) cost of sewing notions such as pins and needles, but another friend suggests that it has something to do with bowling pins. Can you help?

First, while acknowledging that certain dialects of English, especially in the southern United States, show a merging of the vowels in such words as pen and pin to the point where the two words are indistinguishable in speech, I will say that the expression you have in mind certainly is pin money.

There are a few different senses of pin money, and while one of them does refer to the relatively small value of pins, this is not the original sense. The original sense is 'an allowance of money given by a husband to his wife for her personal expenditures'. The first example known of pin money is in 1697, from the English playwright Sir John Vanbrugh, who also gave us the expression much of a muchness which we briefly discussed in this column's youth, but the concept is older. There are records going back to the middle of the sixteenth century of men giving sums of money to their wives for the specific purpose of buying pins.

Another sense is 'spending money' or 'money set aside for minor expenditures', a natural figurative use. The final meaning one is likely to encounter is 'an insignificant or trivial sum of money', as in this 1892 example cited in the OED: "The late Rose Terry Cooke, popular as her writings were, never made more than pin money with her pen." This is the sense that does refer to the inexpensiveness of pins, a fact of real interest in English catchphrases. "Not worth a pin" or "not care/give a pin" are expressions found as far back as the fourteenth century; "it's a sin to steal a pin" is a proverb meaning 'theft is bad regardless of the amount'.

None of these expressions have anything whatsoever to do with bowling, I assure you.