Balthazar Moderator
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#10 · Posted: 26 May 2007 20:44
The only country I can think of which shares its name with a metal object is Guinea. The guinea was a gold coin that was originally worth a British pound, but which rose in value - because of a rise in the price of gold - to a shilling more than a pound.
However, I can't find any guineas in the Tintin books. Although a guinea remains a recognised amount of money to this day (£1.05 in modern decimal money), the coin itself was discontinued a couple of centuries ago, I think.
One of the Thom(p)sons tries to pay for their drinks with a coin near the beginning of The Crab with the Golden Claws. It turns out to be a counterfeit, which might fit your clue about it being wrongly named. He says it's a fifty pence coin in the modern English edition, though I seem to remember it being a predecimal coin in earlier Methuen editions. However, I'm pretty sure that this was a half crown coin (worth two shillings and sixpence), not a guinea (which, as I said, wasn't minted as a single coin in the 20th century) so I don't think this can be it, even if you're setting the question from an old edition!
In any case, I don't think the country Guinea can be spelt two different ways, so I'm pretty sure barking up the wrong tree. But, like I said, that was the only metallic-object-named country I could think of, so I've mentioned it anyway, just in case anyone else can find a guinea coin in the Tintin books.
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