Low diatribe

I've seen dozens of articles and notices about the retirement of the "penny" — something I only recently learned the US Mint has never officially coined. The designation has always been "one-cent piece" or "cent," yet they are universally referred to as the "penny."

The term itself is a cultural inheritance. "Penny" comes from the Old English "pening," originally meaning money or coin, and referred to the British coin early Americans knew well. When the US Mint began producing one-cent coins, people simply carried the familiar word forward out of habit. What started as linguistic momentum became permanent cultural practice.

This feels like an even more deeply embedded popular use of a term than brand genericization like Kleenex or Band-Aid — and even more universally used than "googling" information or "photoshopping" a picture. But the penny represents something different — a complete cultural override of official terminology that's lasted for generations, rooted in the deeper currents of how language actually travels.

What fascinates me isn't the linguistic curiosity, but what it reveals about the relationship between authority and reality. The US Mint can insist all they want that it's a "cent." They can print it on official documents, engrave it in policy, and correct people in formal settings. But when they announce they are retiring the cent, all the coverage is about the penny, all the talk is about the penny, the official footage of the mint pressing the LAST PENNY.

There's a leadership lesson buried in this stubborn persistence of the "wrong" word.

I've watched leaders exhaust themselves fighting cultural momentum instead of working with it. The executive who mandates that all project updates flow through formal status meetings while the team has organically developed targeted conversations — quick hallway check-ins, focused Slack threads, coffee-break problem-solving sessions — that actually move work forward. The most effective communication happens in these unplanned moments, yet leadership keeps trying to channel everything through official processes that feel disconnected from how the work really gets done.

Sometimes being right becomes a barrier to being effective.

The penny won despite never being official because it felt more natural, more human-scaled than "cent." It stuck because it worked better in the mouth, in conversation, in the daily reality of how people actually talk about small change. No committee decided this. No authority figure decreed it. It just happened, the way water finds its level.

This is how culture actually works — not through official channels and formal decisions, but through the accumulated weight of millions of small choices. Each person who says "penny" instead of "cent" is casting a vote in an election that never ends.

Effective leaders understand this invisible democracy. They recognize when they're fighting a tide that's stronger than their authority. They learn to distinguish between hills worth defending and battles that reveal they've lost touch with their own culture.

There's wisdom in knowing when to adapt your official approach to the reality of how people actually work, think, and communicate. When insisting on "correct" terminology makes you sound like someone who doesn't understand the world they're trying to lead.

I learned this lesson the first time I visited Canada. I asked the bartender for some "dollar coins" for the pool table. "Dollar coins?!?" He snorted, "They're called 'loonies' here, son." Then he asked, "What part of the States are you from?" My language had immediately marked me as an outsider who didn't understand the local culture. The official term meant nothing; the cultural term meant everything.

But there's also discernment required. Not every cultural drift deserves accommodation. The art lies in recognizing which changes represent genuine evolution and which ones undermine something essential. The penny became universal because it served people better, it carried the faith of the currency they knew. Some linguistic changes happen because they make communication clearer, more precise, more human.

Others happen because they're easier, lazier, more politically convenient, or just fun. The current phenomenon of "brain rot" — where anything can be flattened into mindless catchphrases, regardless of any initial meaning — represents drift without depth, viral spread without genuine utility. Everything is collapsed into something with the urgency and weight of signal with no information. It does warm my heart to see the energy and sense of community and joy felt by a room of 10-year-olds shouting "67," but there is little else there. The leader's job isn't to rubber-stamp every cultural shift, but to understand the difference between organic evolution and hollow momentum.

The penny lasted 232 years, and I wonder how long we'll continue to "hang up" phone calls even though we no longer perform that physical action. Like "dialing" a number or "rolling down" car windows, these phrases outlive their literal meaning because they capture something essential about the experience. "Terminate the connection" is technically accurate, but "hang up" carries emotional weight that feels different from ending a call. These persistent phrases remind us that authority without influence is just noise, and that influence often flows through the informal channels where people say "penny" when they mean "cent" and are universally understood when doing it.

The penny teaches us that sometimes the most powerful changes happen without anyone deciding they should happen. They emerge from the collective wisdom of people solving real problems in real time. The best leaders learn to recognize these currents and work with them rather than against them.

In the end, the penny persisted not because it was right, but because it was real. And sometimes, in leadership as in language, real matters more than right.