Spot the Frippet: bill.

 The internet has many marvels, and one of them is that we get many fewer bills. There was a time when bills for fuel and water and taxes came along very regularly, and then you had to find a cheque book, write a cheque, find a stamp of the right denomination, lick it, stick on the return envelope, and then take it out to a post box and post it.

Luckily, there are other types of bill to spot. In Britain a record of the amount due in a restaurant is called a bill; a small poster advertising a play or a film or a circus is a bill:

 and in America a piece of paper money is a bill, too.

And then there's the other kind of bill, which birds:

Eurasian spoonbill, photo by Hari K Patibanda

and platypuses*

illustration by Heinrich Harder

and some insects:

bluegrass billbug. Photo by By Joseph Berger, Bugwood.org - https://www.invasive.org/browse/detail.cfm?imgnum=5402440, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77470420

carry on the front of their faces.

They can be lovely things, bills.

But I'm still glad that the kind you have to pay has mostly gone.

Spot the Frippet: bill. The money word comes from the Latin word bulla, which means document. The pecking word comes from the old English bile, and is related to bill, sword, and the Old High German bil, pickaxe.

*All right, platypodes if you must.