A Lot of Lolly

A mistaken credit card purchase—booking a hotel room twice in confusion and haste—made me think that, well, this is a first-world problem, and I shouldn’t worry too much about it, and anyway I can probably get a refund when the mistake is sorted out.

A first-world problem—This is a phrase that’s become very popular recently, and it’s useful to be jogged into remembering that we are so lucky to be born into the first world, and that our problems are nothing to those of people in the real poverty of the third world—or the developing world as it’s supposed to be known these days. 

So I stopped worrying. I put it in perspective. It’s an amount of money, not, thankfully, starvation.

But the incident also jogged my memory. “But that’s a lot of lolly!” my mother would have said. And it occurred to me that nobody else ever says ‘lolly’ meaning  ‘money’. I don’t think I’ve heard the expression for many years in fact.

We live in the southern part of the UK, and no one uses this word there to mean money. I wonder if it’s northern British dialect? Perhaps a Yorkshire-ism?  I’ve checked and the best I can do is find that it seems to have become current from the 1940’s and popular in the ‘60’s, so my mother would have become familiar with it, whether when she was a child in Yorkshire in the north of England, or as an adult in Dorset, south England.

Meanwhile, this made me think of some of the many other words we have for ‘money’:

brass (said with a short northern British ‘a’); dough; bread; dosh; spondoolies, or spons; cash; bacon — as in ‘bring home the bacon’ meaning ‘earn the money’.

We have a huge wealth of words for wealth. Quite an English language obsession… I wonder if this is typical in most other languages?

Some theories as to the origins of ‘lolly’ meaning ‘money’:

lolly = money. More popular in the 1960s than today. Precise origin unknown. Possibly rhyming slang linking lollipop to copper. - See more at: http://www.learnenglish.de/slang/moneyslang.html#sthash.m1CNfBBC.dpuf  

Mid 19th century: abbreviation. Lolly dates from the 1940s.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/lolly