‘Another day, another dollar’ is a weary remark about another day of routine work for modest pay. It is American, from the days of a dollar a day, and appears in this form in US newspapers by 1907. People say it with a shrug, either on getting up to face the day or on finishing it.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Another day, another dollar’?
‘Another day, another dollar’ began as a sailor’s expression in the USA in the 19th century. It dates from the days when sailors were paid a dollar a day.
On long voyages each day was similar to the last and all that the seamen had to show for a day’s work was one more dollar in their pocket.
Joseph Conrad referred to the form of payment in his seafaring novel The [N-word] of the ‘Narcissus’: A Tale of the Forecastle, 1897:
The common saying, ‘More days, more dollars,’ did not give the usual comfort because the stores were running short.
The nautical saying turns up twice in that novel. Earlier in the book the old seaman Singleton, telling the crew that a sick shipmate cannot be saved, puts it the same way: they know a long passage means more days and more dollars. The comfort is plain enough. A slow voyage was miserable, but every extra day at sea was another day on the ship’s books.
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Who said ‘another day, another dollar’ first? Well, it was an American sailor.
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Conrad was a successful novelist and the currently used form of the expression soon started appearing in other places. A story entitled ‘Gittin’ up time’ was reprinted in several US newspapers in March 1907, including the Logansport (Indiana) Daily Reporter:
I sat up and stretched and yawned. “Oh hum! The same old grind. Another day, another dollar.”
Green’s Dictionary of Slang has the same story from the Brooklyn Citizen of 26 March 1907, where the sleeper’s yawn is printed as ‘Ohbum!’ rather than ‘Oh hum!’, and that March 1907 printing is the earliest example Green’s gives of the phrase in its familiar form. The one quotation Green’s puts before it is bracketed as a forerunner rather than the phrase proper: on 15 September 1892 the United Labor of Independence, Kansas, printed ‘I am compelled to go back and labor another day for another dollar to get my child’s shoes’. Green’s next example, from the Press and Sun-Bulletin of Binghamton, New York, of 9 December 1911, has a man muttering it as he walks away.
Green’s labels the phrase ‘orig. US’ and separates two uses of it. The first, the one running from 1907, points up the tedium of quotidian existence. The second is a phrase of relief at the end of the working day, which Green’s dates from the Garrett Clipper of Indiana on 25 April 1918: ‘Well another day another dollar.’ Both are current, and which one you hear depends on the hour. Britain took the expression later. The eighth edition of Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 1984, quoted by Green’s, calls it ‘adopted from the US, where it has been current since ca. 1910’.
The phrase has been used as a song title several times, among them the Gang of Four release Another Day/Another Dollar of 1982, which Green’s lists among its examples.
It belongs with the daily grind and with keep your nose to the grindstone, which take the same view of repetitive work done for wages.
The proverb has long since lost its nautical connections and is now used worldwide as an ironic and weary resignation marking the start of another unremarkable working day.