Engels, pay my rent

Sorry ur wife died or whatever, can you send me 50 bucks?

It will never stop being weird to me that you anglos just translate his first name to Frederick / Fred instead of going with Friedrich / Fritz, it's as if i was calling Biden and Stalin "Jupp" because that's the traditional short form for Joseph in the Rhineland.

Wait i've actually called Stalin Jupp in the past nvm

Edit: RIP my inbox lol

these replies are actually really informative

Engels translated his own name as Fred actually

We have evidence of this as early as the 1838-9 letters to his sister Marie (Engels was in the habit of using random bits of English even in his earliest letters).

And it becomes more prominent ofc once he moves to England and lives there. Marx himself used 'Fred' to refer to Engels often, including in this Dec. 6 1868 letter
- What is this letter? This reads really poorly translated
his name is Joey Steel and don't you fuckin forget that
- This is anti Georgian discrimination, heeeey!
- yo it's ya boi Freddy Angles here
you mean ol' freddy boy?
the fredman?
the fredinator?
Honestly, here in Poland we use polonized names for the theorists and they were also polonized historically. Karol Marks, Fryderyk Engels, Włodzimierz Lenin, Józef Stalin and so on.

Including even some soviet politicians and more people presumably, but most just have their names phoneticized for polish speakers. If a guy is of a Polish origin, it's guaranteed their name will be written fully in Polish. Like Feliks Dzierżyński and Róża Luksemburg for example.
who calls him Frederick? i've only ever seen Friedrich
- Me Haha yah who would make such an obvious error
- Really? I've regularly seen English translations on here where he's called that.

Dear Fred, please send me 25 bucks, I have received a credible tip on a new alt-coin that Lafargue has invested in.

It honestly seems insane to me that £3 then equals £418 now. But apparently the farthing was 1/960 of a pound so it's not like they were too limited on dividing it. I guess it's easier to think of the penny (or maybe the shilling?) as their "base unit" the same we way might consider the pound or dollar as the base.

But then I look at US inflation (where by that point the penny was the lowest denomination) and it looks $3 then is about $65 today so there's a huge gap there. I can't find what the exchange rate was at the time though.

Oh god I finally understand the name penny farthing
The UK government deliberately devalued the pound a couple of times, we had the great depression significantly devalue the pound, and the 70s&80s were sustained periods of high inflation.

But then I look at US inflation

Bretton-Woods and some shenanigans with the UKs war debt devalued it significantly against the dollar multiple times.

Rent is expensive marx-angry

i mean if i was the son of some rich industrialist i would pay my friend's rent too tbh, but i wonder if the terse writing is just how they wrote or if it is karl marx hiding feelings of inadequacy or something, its hard to ask others for money even if you know they would give it, especially for a cis man in a very patriarchal time. especially hard to ask outside of the immediate family as well. it might have been weirder for engels if marx opened with some kind of softener line or sob story right? idk how their relationship was though. dudes are weird sometimes.

I can imagine writing like that if invited to do so. If he doesn't want to hear a sob story because he's busy or indifferent, then cutting to the chase makes it easier to read. It could be indicative of feelings of inadequacy, but I wouldn't conclude that based on a bare bones note.
- Might also be more appropriate like this if Engels is going to open it and hand it to a secretary or something to sort out.
i wonder if the terse writing is just how they wrote or if it is karl marx hiding feelings of inadequacy or something

I little bit of Column A and Column B