One is silver and the other is gold

If you ever attended camp, be it summer camp, scout camp or even band camp, you may remember sitting around the campfire singing songs. In particular, you may remember a song that advised you try to gain new friends, but not to forget the friend you already had.

The lyrics to the first verse of that song were:

Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.

Of course I assumed that the new friends were silver and the old friends were gold. Because often when people are ranking metals, silver takes second place to gold. And I imagined that the song was saying that as great as new friends are, you have not spent enough time with these new friends for them to really prove their worth, so the yearned the designation of silver. Meanwhile, you old friends were tried and true, or else they would not still be your friends, right? Since they had stood the test of time, your old friends were as good as gold.

But who is to say, really? After all, song lyrics, like poetry, are open to interpretation. Based on the order it seems as if new=silver and old=gold, but you can think of it any way you want.

When I actually looked up the lyrics, I found that there was another verse that declared that lasting value of both gold and silver. We rarely sang the entire song, so I did not know about the other verses. The later verse I refer to goes like this:

Silver is precious, Gold is too. I am precious and so are you.

Now in that verse, silver and gold seem to be on equal footing, since both are thought to be precious. In fact, since silver is named first and gold is added later as being precious "too," perhaps it is really silver that the songwriter valued. Who can really say? After all if “you” and “I” are equally precious, who is to say that we cannot view gold and silver as being on the same level when it comes to value.

You cannot put a value on friendship, really. But you can ascertain the value of both gold and silver, especially if you are looking to sell silver or sell gold. You can check out www.kitco.com to get more information about the market price of silver. Another site with valuable information about thee market value of precious metals is www.thebulliondesk.com.