The Peculiar Case of Impecunious People

Before humans could arrive at the idea of a standardized medium of exchange, there was a phase of trial and error. Anything and everything was currency. If you wanted a horse, it would set you back 2 cows. A cow, on the other hand, would cost you 2 quintals of wheat. But the exchange was the easy part here. Finding someone who has a bottle of milk and would like to trade it for 4 eggs that you have was an even bigger problem. So when a solid medium of exchange was established, it transformed the way people led their lives. Then coins made of silver, gold and other metals paved the way for paper notes – effectively leading to the extinction of the barter method in the modern age. Yet, its remnants can still be found in a few words that we use in the English language.

Take the word pecuniary for example which means something related to or consisting of money. So if we say that people were provided pecuniary aid by the government during the lockdown, we mean that they were provided with monetary aid. It is derived from the Latin pecu which meant cattle or flock since cattle were a common medium of exchange as well as an indicator of wealth in the ancient time. In Ireland, cattle were used as currency as late as the 1400s, long after the introduction of coinage.

A related Latin root peculium was used to refer to private property. Its derivation, peculiar, thus means typical, exclusive or unique. For instance, when we say that Madhubani painting is peculiar to the Mithila region of Bihar, we mean that it is exclusive to that region. Since things that are not shared by the majority are considered odd, peculiar can also convey the sense of something being strange or unusual as in “He is a peculiar person.”