Maybe its life will be spared, thanks to the cost-cutting considerations Phil and Ramesh raise. But if it goes, a brief goodbye.

Boyhood coin collectors like myself know that of course it is the cent piece (since it is one hundredth of a dollar). But penny from longtime English usage has stuck.

The United States started minting honking big copper cent and half-cent pieces (12½ cents was a rather common price, as one eighth of a dollar). They were never popular and were aesthetically undistinguished.

The cent piece in its current size debuted before the Civil War. The most beautiful was unquestionably the earliest, the Flying Eagle cent. The obverse bore an eagle in flight, a bold design, and the reverse showed an attractive wreath of corn and other produce.

The Indian Head design that followed for 60 years was less striking, but still impressive. The name is a misnomer: The young lady wearing the Indian headdress on the obverse is not supposed to be a Native American, but Liberty herself. Compare her features with those of the man on the Buffalo nickel, which were based on actual Indian models. The headdress was a freedom fashion accessory: Indians could be hailed as free once they had been moved aside. The wreath on the reverse was plainer than the Flying Eagle’s and got plainer still over time.

Then in 1909 for the centennial of Lincoln’s birth he appeared on the obverse. Sorry, Abe: You are the best, but you make a ho-hum coin head. The wheat ears that accompanied you were the plainest reverse yet, though they were exceeded in poorness by the Lincoln Memorial, substituted in 1959—cramped and squinchy, like the Parthenon entering a tiny-house design contest. The ill-fated commission celebrating Lincoln’s bicentennial in 2009 accomplished only one thing, a shield design for the reverse of the cent, which is a complete disaster—unrelated to the subject, dull as dirt.

What next if the penny/cent goes? We can’t not have Lincoln in our pockets, so where shall we put him? Here’s an idea: Move him to the dime (with an actually good-looking reverse), and to soothe our D friends, put FDR on a dollar coin. Bipartisanship will be served, and since dollar coins have never been popular since the Spanish piece of eight faded, no one will see it.