OT - old stamps for new?

If I bought a 6d stamp, it was a six penny stamp, for which I paid sixpence.

Exactly. This thread was about stamps, so that was what I was referring to, not the coinage.

Does it not say something about quantity, and filling in a form on the web site, the page I looked at a couple of months back did, and had also a rider about outdated stamps which have already become unusable.

I've not looked recently to see if their stamp swap has changed. It seems to me to be a little odd that special issue stamps and Christmas stamps are allowed even if they do not have bar codes. If they can do that why not save themselves a whole lot of admin and set a year or so ahead for the ordinary ones to expire?

Its inefficiency and daft decisions like this that make Royal Mail lose so much money, when other delivery services make money. Brian

Exactly. And in the page I read a couple of months back, there was a star that said as much. Mind you the way they are working at the moment, you will be lucky to see the replacements or have them delivered to the right town. Brian

The first is an example of it being used as an adjective to qualify the meaning of 'stamp'

And that is how its usage was for me.

It was never a four pence stamp, it was a 'forpny' stamp.

Penny chew. Tuppeny f*ck, Thruppeny banger, Forpny, Fivepenny, Sixpenny etc.

Only when stating sums of money was the plural 'pence' used. Only when talking about individual coins was 'pennies ' used as in 'I have five pennies and three ha'pennies'.

These days of course with the plural form of verbs erased from the language and everyone is bored *of* grammar, there is no 'correct' usage.

We is not amused

as e.g. in a /sixpenny/ nail what (once upon a time) cost /sixpence/ an 'undred

As TNP points out, you need to polish up on your grammar.

Don’t forget the tanner!

The last posting date for Xmas UK delivery is next week.

I know they are on strike and and their are delays but I wish they would stop sending out tracking emails stating your package will be delivered tomorrow/today and then it turning up a day or two later than stated.

I'm also starting to see more and more mail pushed through my letter box not addressed to me. Mostly near neighbouring addresses but some not even close to my address (wrong street + wrong postcode).

Currently I'm awaiting some documentation to turn up but how long should I wait to before deciding that it has been lost? Recently some 1st class mail has taken over a week to be delivered.

I cannot ever remember being taught what I have just said in English grammar, but I was taught to analyse and parse sentences, and my observation is that sixpence is a quantity (of money) , six pennies is a collection of coins and (a) sixpenny (piece/bit) is an adjective.

Ah Yes

Mary had a tin cow She milked it with a spanner The milk came out in shilling tins And small ones, for a tanner...

Golly that was more fun than 'baby shark'

Nothing to do with the postal service, but we have once had a delivery and twice had attempted deliveries of prescription medication. Same house number, same road name, different postcode and different town - which is really odd, as the pharmacy's delivery driver has to go well out of area to reach us. We may only be 2 miles away, but they have to drive 4 or so miles to get to the motorway, use it to cross the Manchester Ship Canal and then drive another 2 miles to get to us. The pharmacy is VERY unlikely to have any delivery customers in this area.

In many cases the admin associated with exchange is probably going to cost more than the stamps are worth.

I've resorted to using labels that I've printed myself using the RM web site to pay postage and where the resulting additional QR code contains information about the value of the stamp and also the delivery address making automatic sorting easier.

Spending millions to save pennies.

They issued many different stamps and all of the first and second class ones have the phosphor bands on for that quality of postal service. It doesn't matter which colour they are from the recent ones back.

It is a bad idea to pay for first class post using a second class stamp and extra numeric value stamps to make up the difference - the automatic sorter will give it second class service.

AFAIK the ones priced in actual numbers will stay valid until you exchange them.

It is the high quality of the modern forgeries that is causing them big problems. The new QR coded stamps should be a lot more robust in that respect (until the bad guys figure out how to fake them).

However, the way they announced it was ludicrous beyond words! Allowing people enough time to use up existing stocks would make a lot more sense. It became even crazier after they started selling their old stocks of non-QR QEII stamps after the queen died (since some smaller post offices had run out of the proper new ones).

You couldn't make it up!

I'm not sure of your logic here. Why should 6d be "six penny" but 4p be "4 pence"? Was it to make a clear distinction between old and new pence? I think a lot of people referred to new pence as "p" (pee), even as an adjective (eg "a 4 pee stamp").

I never understood why "threepenny" was elided into "thruppeny" (with a U) in some dialects, rather than "threppeny" (with the same E as in threepenny).

I was 8 when decimalisation occurred. I've vague memories of "old money" but even from a very early age I can remember thinking "but this is STUPID - we learn to count and calculate in base 10 but money and weight (mass) use base

It's interesting that old-money coins had nicknames (eg 6d=tanner, 1s=bob,

Wasn't it only the 50p coin that went into circulation before 1971? I thought that there were no 1p and 2p coins, nor 5p (as opposed to 1s) or 10p (as opposed to 2s) coins in circulation before 1971. Or were the 5p and 10p coins also released a year or say before decimalisation - was it only the "copper" coins that were delayed until 1971?

Friends of mine used to have an official address of

Road name Village name Nearest large town name Post code

The RM sorting/delivery office was in that large town.

Unfortunately the large town also had a road with the same name as that in the village. My fiends stopped using the "nearest large town name" in the address when ordering items which seemed to to sort out most of the mis-delivery problems.

I remember walking up the road to the newsagent and buying my weekly Beano with a sixpence (*) and getting my change in new pence: on decimalisation day I didn't yet have any new pence coins to pay with. Nowadays a comic would cost a *lot* more than a couple of (new) pence, and children would probably be driven to the shops rather than walking or cycling.

It's a sign of the times that most of the shops in our local parade closed long ago and were turned into flats. The hairdressers and the newsagent (now a convenience store) survive, but the grocer, the greengrocer, the butcher and the off-licence have all closed. But then there was no supermarket: I can remember the excitement when the first Grandways opened.

(*) Still accepted by shops etc with a value of 2 1/2 p rather than 6d for about a decade after decimalisation.