If folding money were art, the numbers in the corners of the bills would be changeable, flickering up or down like those on tote boards, and popular choice would come to rate the former single above the former double sawbuck.
In another setting — not in Afghanistan, that is, and not on a battlefield — the load lashed to a mule's sawbuck saddle would be entirely different.
A persistent legend among many young Texas males is that if you asked for change for a 20 at the Snake Farm, your double sawbuck would be kept and you'd be directed to one of the trailers out back, where a lady of the night would be waiting, in the tradition of the Chicken Ranch in La Grange.
If you gals can afford $200 for a cut-and-color, another sawbuck isn't going to bankrupt you.
All our influential friends agreed that the improvement was feeble-minded and even that we stood a far better chance of smothering than we did before, but the thought of slipping one of the boys a sawbuck to away & forget about it aroused nothing but horror.
With rotating portraits, we can have a musicians' fin (Foster, Gershwin, Ellington), a scribblers' sawbuck (Twain, Melville, Dickinson), a performing-arts twenty (Caruso, Keaton, Balanchine), a secular saints' fifty (Douglass, Jane Addams, King), and a scientists' C-note (Franklin, Edison, Einstein).
"We're taking a gamble and blowing a sawbuck on a cake for her.
If I slip you a sawbuck (named for the crossed construction used for sawing logs, evocative of a Roman numeral X), you know you can pass it along to anyone else for the exact same value.
Meanwhile, a rising chorus of scholars is opposing the idea of a Reagan $10 bill, pointing out that the sawbuck is a fitting memorial to the man who made the U.S. government solvent.
