Who wants to look a million dollars, these days?
Two friends and I were walking through our various rationales for some recent stupid act or thought. I didn't pay my tax on time, because I didn't want to cash in my premium bonds before the end of the month, because maybe I'd win a million pounds. H reckons if she applied herself seriously to writing erotic fanfic, she would definitely make a million pounds. D was wondering what the maximum amount of compensation would be for a range of workplace accidents, what limb you'd have to lose for a million pounds. She's dreaming. She's a graphic designer.
One million pounds has been the objective unit of gigantic wealth for as long as I've been alive. There has never been any point in two million and it would sound unbelievably pedantic to wish for three. That's 50 years, during which time the value of one million pounds has changed quite a lot. Half a century ago, you could have bought an island, and now you might get a house with a well-made kitchen island. Yet the word has meant 'unimaginably massive' all that time. It never even respected currency variation – when a photo caption once ran 'Elizabeth Taylor arrived looking like a million dollars' and the newspaper sub added, per house style, '(£565,000)', people found that ridiculous; of course she didn't look like £565,000. If she looked like a million dollars, she looked like a million pounds.
Has it been this way for ever? Have we been fantasising about a million pounds ever since a million actually meant a billion, and correspondingly, are we condemned by convention for our fantasies to get smaller and smaller, in real terms? Actually, no; almost a century ago (1934), it was a thousand pounds. 'Darling,' someone says to the harlot in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, 'what does the country do to you? You look like a thousand pounds.' If money words could get anywhere close to conveying their value, there would have been some gradation, a good few decades ago when pretty people looked like 257 grand before they leapt up to six figures. But it's hard to do metaphor and denomination at the same time, and the poet always wins.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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