Thanks tswum.

Do you think the expression is based on some now-forgotten superstition? I was hoping it would be. I thought of Borges's cursed Zahir which "posses the terrible propery of being unforgettable, and whose imagine finally drives one mad’; I thought it might have to do with Judas's thirty silver pieces; or maybe the opposite of the coin which Leopold Bloom marks and sets adrift "on the waters of civic finance" in the hope it will one day be returned to him, but never is.

>Bad here alludes to a counterfeit coin.

So I guess it's just something ordinary like that counterfeit coins used to be so common the odds were you'd eventually get one.

Thanks for the information though.

Last edited by Hydra; 01/23/07 07:27 AM.