Phrase: Drop-a-dime
If you are a fan of old movies, you may have heard the term drop-a-dime more than once.
Back in the day, before the invention of smartphones or cell phones, for that matter, people had to use public payphones.
I’m forty-four, and I remember walking up to the local payphone on the corner to apply via touchtone phone for my university courses.
At that time, students could choose their classes via telephone, but it had to be a touchtone phone.
My home phone was a rotary phone, which did not produce the required tones or sounds.
Here I go again, digressing by waxing nostalgic about phones and university.
As I was saying, before the invention of cell phones, people used public payphones.
If you watch old episodes of Dragnet, you’ll notice that the police stopped at payphones to call headquarters and report where they were and what they were doing.
Drop a dime means a criminal called the police to give information about a fellow criminal. It referred only to giving information to cops.
Of course, police dramas also have a lot of criminals, and criminals sometimes become informants who share information with the police to receive more lenient treatment.
Whenever a police informant called the police to give them information, they dropped a dime on someone.
Why was it called dropping-a-dime?
Well, the cost to make a call back then was 10 cents or a dime, as a ten-cent piece is commonly called.
People had to insert a dime into the payphone; it would drop inside, and the person could make their call.
Hence, an informant dropped a dime on someone when they called the police to give information about a fellow criminal.
It’s important to note that dropping-a-dime only referred to bad guys calling the police to give them information about other bad guys.
It didn’t apply to regular people making a call or calling the police.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 67.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.