lxchilton

It's a good question but you also have to include the fact that he's already so delayed by the fueling et al; Cooper has to weigh the value of each moment he's still on the ground as it's far more likely to impact his ability to complete his heist. No one can storm the plane in the air and so he might make decisions that are counterintuitive if we are trying to pin down his level of experience off of one or two actions.

That's the flip side of the coin--he was either prepared to deal with any kind of chute he got or completely ignorant of them. His actions suggest that he was capable though so I tend to think he wasn't put off beyond the situation regarding the knapsack and the lack of d rings.

This is probably the most important point regarding everything that happens post landing in Seattle; Cooper already feels like it's taken longer than it should have to get on the ground again and then it takes forever to get the fuel on board. Each new stage of the hijacking (getting the money, chutes, etc.) has to be fast tracked and trying to use his actions at this point to identify who he was or what level of experience he had is going to be somewhat flawed. His ability to keep moving under those circumstances is good evidence that he a) felt comfortable when it came to parachuting and b) had his wits about him to not freak out and keep moving forward with the plan, adapting to try and keep to a basic schedule as best he could. Cooper knew parachutes enough to deal with what he got.

I'd agree that if Cooper said it it was more a weird turn of phrase on his end rather than meaning anything other than "circulated" US dollars.

Weird as hell, though the fact that it shows up almost exclusively in the post WWII and pre-Vietnam era suggests that Cooper absolutely had to have picked it up overseas during WWII. Which is the opposite of a shocker since I would be completely floored if he hadn't served at that time. I think there would have been a good sized chunk of the male population who would have read the 1958 baseball article and immediately recognized the phrase for what it was and not been puzzled by it; in that way it's "regular."

I made that post a while back on Reddit...my take on the "negotiable American currency" thing is that Cooper at some point was stationed overseas during WWII. The vast majority of the available mentions of it on Newspapers.com are in the 15ish years from near the end of the war up until 1960ish; it's more likely to me that he said it and served in WWII or that the person who put those words in his mouth served in WWII. I bristle at the suggestion that it definitely points to a point of origin in the States for Cooper or that it means he was somehow not American as it's something that people were saying in sort of banal (in reference to the cost of a baseball game in the 1950s, etc.) way in specifically American sources somewhat regularly.