Can Someone Explain When An Error Becomes A Varierty?

Hi Seattle,

You said...

"I want to reinforce the fact that although there may be a street definition of a term and a numismatic definition of it, that for the benefit of the hobby and the understanding of everyone, we should move away from relying on such terms and move to more universally understood ones."

This is a difficult one to do.

A "strike" at the mint can be the actual manufacture of a coin. That would, of course be a numismatic definition.

OR:-)

A "strike" at the Mint could be a bunch of workers outside the facility walking around with picket signs. That's a fair street definition:-)

There will be terms in any hobby, or job , or for that matter just about anything else where terms used in one area of life will mean one thing and yet are accepted definitions for completely different things in a hobby or job.

For a logger, pitch as a noun is tree sap. For a baseball player, the word pitch as a verb means to toss the ball. As a noun it's the ball itself as it is flying through the air. It also means tree sap as they used to put pitch on a baseball bat years ago. OH, OH, baseball uses the word "strike" too. You can see where I'm going:-)

It doesn't seem that changing the terms so that they can't be confused would be the way to go. I think the context in which the words are used should be the key to the definitions. It's up to us not to confuse them.

Thanks,
Bill

Actually the quote by Amazon99 is not completely correct either. It does not take multiple hubbings to create a doubled die. The single squeeze process of hubbing is proof of that.

BJ Neff

So then if we change to the following:

doubled die - gnorkle
repunched mintmarks - gimble
variety - plash
die variety - hurkle
error - quiggle

then we could say:

All gnorkles are hurkles as are all gimbles. It might be possible to have a hurkle on a quiggle or a plash, but certainly not all plashes can be considered hurkles just as not all quiggles have hurkles or plashes. It is possible, however, to have a single coin that's a hurkle, quiggle, and plash, whether it be a gnorkle or a gimble.

I think I'd rather stick to terms that, while can be confusing to those who don't have the education, still make perfect sense to all those who do. For those who cannot make sense of it on their own, they need to have an open mind and go to those who do know for their education. I have never met a true numismatist who wouldn't share their knowledge with others who were genuinely interested in learning.

WHEW! I will have to be more careful about the cans of worms I open! This is great stuff but it made me tired. Really, this was wonerfully informative. Thanks!

p.s.:Don't let your gorkle plash unless you gimble it first...or something like that