BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A EURO?

By CALVIN TRILLIN

Those who think I haven't given sufficient attention to international monetary policy will be pleased to learn that I've been in London studying the euro, the unified currency being adopted by the European Union, and have decided that it sounds too much like a small car.

I believe it was John Maynard Keynes who said, "If a currency is going to sound like an automobile, it should at least sound like a large automobile." It is easy to imagine an Englishman saying, "I've been thinking of buying a little runabout--perhaps one of those new Euros."

"A bit tinny, aren't they?" his wife replies. "Maybe you should spring for a Sterling, or if that's too rich for your blood, at least a Lira--a Lira convertible, perhaps."

The process of melding a number of currencies into one is called European Monetary Union, which is customarily expressed by the acronym EMU. The English, I think, would be reluctant to use the term even if they were not aware that an EMU is a large edible bird, native to Australia.

It is assumed that this reluctance comes in large part from the national pride established over the centuries during which the British Empire was bringing the blessings of parliamentary democracy and overcooked vegetables to vast areas of the world--a pride leading naturally to the assumption that even though the royal family may be essentially German in origin, the currency should be purely English.

As I was reminded by my research, though, it was only in 1970 that the British government, after countless centuries, decided that a pound sterling did not, in fact, consist of 20 shillings, each of which consisted in turn of 12 pence. Suddenly, the pound consisted of simply 100 pence--a system whose logic and simplicity must have struck the average English adult as positively disorienting.

One of the people I've interviewed during my stay in London, a biographer named Claire Tomalin, told me that to this day she converts a restaurant check back into the old pounds, shillings and pence so that she can, as she was raised to do, calculate the tip at two and six (or half a crown) for each pound.

I'll admit that Tomalin is somebody who converts centigrade temperature into Fahrenheit before she ventures out of the house and is widely suspected of having written her recently published biography of Jane Austen in longhand.

Still, in a country that has always prized tradition, there must be a lot of people like her. The British people--who, to put the case positively, have always been free of the taint of flightiness--are being asked to make a change in currency at a time when they've had only 27 years to absorb the previous change.

Also, they've been telling me, the euro would be unified only on paper. Spoken out loud, the euro is as many currencies as there are languages. The Spanish would presumably call it an ay-oo-roe. The French pronunciation is so odd that an English doctor I spoke to advised against attempting it on an empty stomach.

My research convinced me that there is one way the European Union could make the new currency more attractive to the British public: each euro could be divided into 20 shillings, and each shilling into 12 pence.