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SPOILER INFO
No spoilers. This article is about a flaw in Skyrim terminology.
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Gold is a metal and a commodity.
Gold is not a means of payment. The officially established legal means of payment is called money.
Gold is not a unit of money. The unit of money (in Skyrim) is called septim.
You can't pay with gold ingots for wares in shops, can you? Gold may be the material coins are made of, and the coins may be the legal tender, but that doesn't mean gold is money. The phrase "20 gold" is as nonsensical as "30 sand" or "10 electricity".
I am astonished at the sight of one computer game after another released whose authors are too stupid to distinguish between those concepts. Money is routinely being referred to as "gold" and unit of money is routinely referred to as "gold" (meaning, the unit of gold is gold; gold consists of golds) even in games where gold is coincidentally a tradeable, transportable commodity.
You have different words for different things in your language. Why don't you fucking use them? Why do you have to turn "gold" into a pronoun which is being used as a substitute for a number of words that mean various things?
The ancient Romans knew the difference between the concepts of money and metal two thousand years ago. The English-speaking world seems to have difficulties with it to this day.
Neither is coin the same thing as money. A coin is a little standardized usually round piece of metal used as a means of payment. Several such pieces of metal are called coins – with the plural ending "s".
COIN IS NOT THE SAME AS GOLD.
GOLD IS NOT THE SAME AS MONEY.
MONEY IS NOT THE SAME AS COIN.
How feeble-minded must a person be to not realize that?
Even more bewilderingly, how can a ludicrous blunder like that happen to someone who writes computer software? Every programmer knows that you have to use correct words for things. If you call a variable a label, your program will work incorrectly or not run at all. So how can people who have written a computer program that does what it's supposed to to (such as the Skyrim game), and thus obviously have the intelligence and the presence of mind necessary to use words of their programming language correctly (to say nothing of being in the habit of doing it and constantly being on the lookout for any even slightest mistakes) be too stupid or too sloppy to use the words of a human language correctly?
[originally published 2016-12-10]
