Illustration

People's imaginations tend to be both material and conservative or historical. Thus when they think of money in its strictest sense, they picture bills and coins - and perhaps even gold bullion. They think "The United States of America" is the physical thing they've seen depicted on a map, with the addenda of Alaska and Hawaii, and informed by tales of the Founding Fathers. That both things are primarily abstractions, and in their more important senses verb-y rather than noun-ish distorts their understanding in particularly unfortunate ways.