A plugged nickel

This morning I woke with an old tune in my head -- a Depression-era ballad my Dad used to sing about a man who tries to pay for a donut with a plugged nickel:

"She looks at the nickel and she looks at me, and she says,
This nickel is no good, can't you see?
There's a hole in the middle and it goes plumb through."
"Well," says I, "there's a hole in the donut too."

A plugged nickel. It's an expression I haven't thought about or heard for a long time, though I heard it many times in my childhood without ever questioning its origins.

"It ain't worth a plugged nickel," Dad would say, and we knew he meant the thing he referred to was something he considered worthless.

Our neighbour Homer used to say it too. Men of that era had their own expressions, now nearly forgotten.

Here is the image I formed in my head when I heard the expression as I sang the song this morning. Out in the backwoods, a man in a mackinaw places a nickel on end on top of a tin can on top of a stump and then gets his rifle and sees if he can shoot a hole in it.

If he's a good shot, the result is a plugged nickel.