Rubies and diamonds, and _The Man Who Would be King_

[Jonathan Lighter]

It's in the movie, silently held aloft by Sean Connery.

  Memory is tricky. Maybe it wasn't much bigger than a coconut.

  The amount of inflation since 1739 does interest me, however.  I was once told (1988) that U.S. inflation since the 1870s grew by a factor of about 40. Later I heard it was more like 20.

  JL

"Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Joel S. Berson"
Subject: Re: Rubies and diamonds, and _The Man Who Would be King_
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Gee, I don't remember that ruby from either the movie or the
tale. (The movie, of course, is large and epic, the tale is small and shabby.)

All I know about sizes comes from (Wikipedia's?) statement of the
number of carats in the Koh-i-Noor diamond -- but I don't know the
volume occupied by one carat.

Joel

At 5/30/2007 06:17 PM, "Facetious" wrote:
>Also, were any of the rubies the size of a soccer ball, like in _The
>Man Who Would Be King_?
>
> J "The Facetious" L
>
>"Joel S. Berson" wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: "Joel S. Berson"
>Subject: Re: Sterling today and yesteryear [was: "Location, location,
>location": a proverb?]
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>At 5/30/2007 05:05 PM, Michael Quinion wrote:
> >The Office of National Statistics in the UK has a downloadable article at
> >
> > http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/article.asp?ID=726
> >
> >with the title Consumer Price Inflation Since 1750. The abstract says that
> >"between 1750 and 2003, prices rose by around 140 times". There's a lot
> >more information in the full article, I believe.
>
>Not far from the 120 I got via my correspondent, for 1746 to 2002
>(perhaps both from the same basic data). And (I say for the second
>time) for a "consumer basket", not specifically for jewels and other
>plunder. What has been the inflation rate for Old Master or (for a
>shorter period) Impressionist paintings?
>
>Joel
>
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