money makes the world go around

So. I finally finished and turned in my paper for my economics class. Who knew that you had to write a paper in economics. Go figure. It was about the South Korean economy and ended up being much longer than I'd expected. Still, after learning so much about it I must say I'm impressed with the little country. Can you believe that in the mid-50s the country was poverty-stricken, had basically no infrastructure and was almost completely dependant on foreign aid? Now their cell phones are in millions of American hands and they have one of the largest ship-building industries in the world. Crazy.

Anyway. I've moved on to the next chapter in the book and have just learned that I didn't know what money was. There's actually a definition of money in my book. Check it out: Money is a highly liquid financial asset that's generally accepted in exchange for other goods, is used as a reference in valuing other goods and can be stored as wealth. Whatever happened to just calling them bucks, clams or smackaroos?