Hundreds and thousands and millions and billions.
“Millionaire” is a pretty generic idiom in the UK for a rich person, since a million quid will get you a pretty wide range of happiness substitutes. But I’ve often wondered what are the equivalent terms in other countries with different currencies.
A million yen works out at about £4,800 at present, so in Japan millionaires are ten a penny, if you’ll excuse the mixed monetary metaphor. And the winner of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire in Somali shillings would come out with the grand total of £380. From a purely linguistic point of view I’d be interested to know some of the international jargon referring to the rich - it presumably isn’t as blunt and numerically specific as “millionaire”.
Plus, even in the UK a million smackers doesn’t buy nearly as much as it used to – a modest country house in the less desirable of the home counties, or a wee-stained closet in central London. We’re going to need some kind of replacement word since becoming a millionaire will soon be unremarkable.
Billionaire is too big a step – there’s only about a thousand of those in the world at the moment, and even with inflation it’s going to be unattainable by most for some time. Multi-millionaire is, well, a cop-out. It’s too dull and not nearly specific enough; you could have two million or a hundred million. We need an intermediate number to cater for the comfortably rich, rather than the mind-blowingly wealthy.
Of course, I speak as a former millionaire myself. Yes, I once had a million and splurged it all in an orgy of consumerism. Unfortunately, mine was more towards the Somali shilling end of the scale – these were Beenz, a kind of short-lived internet currency/loyalty point that emerged in the heady days of the dot-com boom when I was at university.
While friends monopolised the linguistics department computer rooms late at night, using multiple computers to continuously visit websites and earn a couple of points at a time, I took the easy route and won a competition with a prize of a million beenz. As the world’s first – and probably only – beenz millionaire, fame and fortune stretched out before me like a straightened helter-skelter. Which would make it a slide, I guess. I was interviewed in the Sunday Times, got my picture on the front cover (of the thrilling business section), and…that’s it really.
I blew all my not-so-hard-earned beenz on a load of entertainment kit to stuff into my tiny Uni bedroom: TV, minidisc, DVD player (when DVDs were brand new, and the players weren’t so cheap that you find them in boxes of cereal), and lots more. In all it came to about two and a half grand’s worth of power-hungry appliances - somewhat short of the million figure I started with, and a healthy lesson about exchange rates there.
Not long afterwards the whole Beenz system crashed and burnt in style. I’d like to hope that this was due to reasons other than a certain someone devaluing the currency by suddenly dumping a million of them on the market at once…