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English Phrase: Turn up like a bad penny
The things and people you don’t like always seem to show up unexpectedly in places you’d prefer they didn’t.
I tell you, it’s uncanny.
If you want an example, here’s one.
Imagine you are out celebrating a wedding anniversary with your husband.
There you are, expecting a good dinner and romantic evening at an expensive restaurant when you realize the waiter is your previous, or even worse, current boyfriend.
Some people have a knack for turning up like a bad penny at the most inopportune times.
You may wonder what a bad penny looks like or where the expression originates.
A bad penny or coin has had a piece cut off.
This phrase is used when someone or something appears where they are not wanted.
Well, as long as there have been coins of any kind, there have been bad ones.
Originally, coins were made out of precious metals: a gold coin was solid gold, and a silver one was solid silver, you get my meaning.
Well, people would clip the coins.
They would take a little piece out of it.
If you did that many times to many different coins, eventually, you’d have quite a lot of precious metal.
You can see some pictures here.
The value of the coin depended on the weight of the coin.
Therefore, one that was clipped was less valuable and maybe not even legal currency.
Naturally, if you were given a bad or clipped coin, you wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible.
You’d quickly pass it on to someone else.
However, eventually, clipped coins became so common that as soon as you got rid of one, another would turn up, just like the ex/current boyfriend waiter guy at the restaurant.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 73.
The higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100, the easier the passage is to read.