Let us pause, amid all the monetary turmoil, to reason out the way we talk about gold — particularly all these confounded references to its “value.” This struck us while reading a dispatch of Reuters saying that “every time the price of gold falls by $100 an ounce, as it did on Friday and it has done again today, the value of the world’s gold falls by more than $500 billion.” Reuters is hardly the only offender. ABC news notes that “for years the value of gold soared to fresh highs as its boosters fretted over the risk of hyper-inflation.” Beneath the streets of Manhattan in a vault of the Federal Reserve, the New York Times reports, “the world’s largest trove of gold — half a million bars — has lost about $75 billion of its value.”

To the ears of a copy editor of the Sun, this is like the screech of chalk pushed the wrong way on a blackboard. We don’t mean to suggest that Reuters, ABC, and the Times are alone. A Google search turns up thousands of references to “value of gold,” including in all the best newspapers, and each of them is entitled to its own stylebook. But the “Reporters Handbook and Manual of Style of The New York Sun” includes a pointed warning against referring to the “value of gold,” terming the phrase a “tautology.” The logic of the Sun stylebook is that the value of gold is, in practical terms, constant. We prefer to talk about the value of the dollar. That’s what does all the changing.

This is why one reads relatively few references in the Sun to the price of gold. We’re not against referring to prices. We prefer, though, not to say that the price of gold fell to below $1,400 an ounce. Our preferred style is that the value of the dollar soared to above a 1,400th of an ounce of gold. It is gold, not the dollar, that is the measure of value. The Sun stylebook also urges reporters to avoid using the verb “to sell” if the object is gold. One doesn’t “sell” gold; one “spends” it. There is an ideology stalking our policy precincts that reckons gold is a “commodity” or an “asset.” This fits fine in an era of fiat money. But in the view of the Sun, it is gold that is the money.

Now we are not so solipsistic as to suggest that the Sun stylebook is the last word on this subject. It is merely our standard of style. We are not shy, however, about suggesting that the language in which we speak about the dollar has implications. The value of the dollar barely rose above a 1,400th of an ounce of gold yesterday and already the American Broadcasting Company was talking about how the development “may have damaged the case for any eventual return to the gold standard.” Could be. But it will be less likely if the Congress of the United States, which is preparing to hold potentially historic hearings on the Centennial Monetary Commission Act, pays attention to the language in which we speak of the money the Constitution grants to Congress the power to coin.