Cash (pronounced kash)
(1) Money
in the form of coins or banknotes, historically that issued by a government or a
bank or other financial institution operating with the approval of a government.
(2) Money
or an equivalent paid at the time of making a purchase.
(3) Immediate
payment, in full or part, for goods or services, even if not paid in physical
cash (ie as distinct from the various forms of time (delayed) payment).
(4) To
give or obtain cash for a check, money order, bill of exchange etc.
(5) In
some games of cards, (1) to win (a trick) by leading an assured winner or (2) to
lead (an assured winner) in order to win a trick.
(6) Any
of several low-denomination coins of China, Vietnam, India, and the Dutch East
Indies (modern-day Indonesia), especially the Chinese copper coin.
1590–1600:
From the Portuguese caixa, from the Tamil
காசு (kācu) (a copper coin), from the Sanskrit
karṣa (a
weight (of precious metal such as silver or gold)). There was also the sixteenth century Old
Italian cassa (money box) from the Latin
capsa (case). Variation of cash appear in many languages
including the Japanese: キャッシュ (kyasshu),
the Serbo-Croatian (kȅš & ке̏ш) the Romanian cash and the Swedish cash.
Cashable
is an adjective, cashability & cashableness are nouns. The noun plural is cash (except for the
proper noun; the surname’s plural being Cashes). The homophone of cash is cache, often mispronounced
as kaache although cache’s adoption
as a technical term in computing has led some to suggest kaache should be the use in the industry with kash for all other purposes and there’s much support for the view
which does make sense, even if, given the specificity of the context, confusion
is unlikely. The verb cashier (and the
related cashiering & cashiered) is (1) the simple past tense and past participle of cashier
and (2) the apparently curious term for the dismissal of a military officer, cashiered in
this context from the Dutch casseren &
kasseren, from the Old French casser (to break (up)). During a ceremonial cashiering, the break of
his link with the military was sometimes symbolized dramatically by literally
breaking the officer’s sword (which had in advance been partly sawn through).
The
surname appears to be an American variant of Case, the records indicating it
was first adopted by in the US by German immigrants named Kirch and Kirsch, an
example of the Anglicization of names once a common of those migrating to the English-speaking world. In rare cases it
has been used a male given name, often as a second name reflecting the mother’s
maiden name. A cashier (person in charge
of money), dates from the 1590s, from the French caissier (treasurer), from caisse
(money box), the immediate source of the English word perhaps the Middle Dutch kassier.
Lindsay Lohan themed cash. Unfortunately, these Lohanic notes are not issued by the US Federal Reserve and thus neither legal tender nor readily convertible (at least at face-value) to other currencies. However, Lindsay Lohan is dabbling in the embroynic world of the NFT (non fungible token) which may evolve to have some influence on the development of how cash is stored and exchanged (if not valued).
In idiomatic
use, cashing-in one’s chips means literally to take one’s winnings and leave
the casino but is also used to mean “to die” whereas cashing-up is a technical
term from business referring to the end-of-day audit & balancing procedures.
A moneybags (ie bags full of cash) is someone (usually conspicuously)
rich. A cash-cow is a product or service
which dependably provides the owner or operator a lucrative profit. A cash-crop (agricultural product grown to
sell for profit) is attested from 1831 and was distinct from one with some
other primary purpose (such as for self-sustenance or stock-feed). A cash-back is a trick in advertising and a
form of discount. The phrase cold, hard
cash is another way of emphasizing the primacy of money. A cash-book (which historically were physical
ledgers but most are now electronic) was a transactional register. To cash was “to convert (a cheque (the US check) or other bill of exchange) to cash", known since 1811 as a variation of the noun and the now-extinct encash from 1865 was also used as a
piece of specialized jargon meaning exactly the same thing; it was replaced as
required by cashed & cashing. The
cash-box (also called money-box), dating from the 1590s, was (and remains) a
box for the safe-keeping physical cash and was from the sixteenth century French
caisse (money box), from the Provençal
caissa or the Italian cassa, from the Anglo-Norman & Old
French casse (money box), from the Latin capsa
(box, case) ultimately from capiō (I
take, I seize, I receive), from the primitive Indo-European kehp- (to grasp) (which also led to the Spanish caja (box);
the original sense was literally the wooden or metal box by the eighteenth
century, the secondary sense of the money began to run is parallel before, for
most purposes, becoming the sole meaning.
To cash in is to profit from something, applying it one's advantage. A cash-register, dating from 1875, was
historically a mechanical device used to record transactions and issue receipts,
such machines now mostly electronic and increasingly linked to centralized
(even international) databases; in Jewish humorous use, a cash-register was “a
Jewish piano”. Cash-flow (which
surprisingly seems to date only from 1954) refers to a specific characteristic
of business and means the periodic accumulation of disposable revenue to permit
the operations always to meet its obligations and continue trading; it’s not directly
related to long-term profitability in that something with a good cash-flow can
continue indefinitely while only breaking even while a profitable concern with
a poorly managed cash-flow can flounder.
In commerce, use is common such as cash-and-carry, cash account,
cash-only, discount for cash etc although transaction handling costs have
affected the last: where once it was common for businesses to offer a discount
to customers paying with physical cash (sometimes because it offered the
possibility of a hidden (ie un-taxed) transaction, it’s now not uncommon for a
fee to be imposed, reflecting the difference in processing costs for weightless
(electronic) payments compared with the physical (notes & coins). In criminal slang, "cash" is said to be a euphemism
for “to do away with, to kill” the word "disband" also carrying this meaning
and both “cash” and “disband” are reputed to be used on the dark web as code by
those offering contract killing although such things are hard to verify and may
be an internet myth. Cash on delivery (COD) dates from 1859 and was an invention
of American commerce designed to encourage sales from businesses previously
unknown to the individual consumer.
Cashless (often as cashless-society or cashless transaction) refers
usually to the elimination of physical money (ie notes and coins), something sought
by many bureaucrats for various reasons although of concern to civil
libertarians.
According
to anthropologists, the word cash (money and all that) is really derived from
the word kash, a beer brewed in Ancient Egypt which was used to pay workers (including
the builders of the Great Pyramids). Stone
cutters, slaves, architects, and even public officials were often paid (at
least in part) with beer, two containers of kash often set as the minimum wage
for an Egyptian laborer’s day of work. At the time, there was quite a brewing industry,
the Egyptians known to be distributing at least six varieties of beer by 3,000
BC and there is evidence it played a part in the social conventions of the age:
in some circumstances if a man offered a lady a sip of his beer, they could be
held to be betrothed so dating could be minefield for those who’d drunk too
much.
The traditions associated with kash spread. In Mesopotamia, tavern owners found guilty of overcharging patrons for beer could be sentenced to death by drowning in the Tigris or Euphrates rivers (depending on where the establishment was located) although most punishments were apparently commuted to fines. The Ancient Babylonians, serious about beer making, to regulate quality decreed that any commercial beer maker who sold unfit beer was to be drowned in that very impure libation although no records exist which confirm how many were actually suck in their own dodgy brew. The most attractive Babylonian tale (although not one all historians accept) is that more happily, a bride’s father would supply all the “honey" kash (a form of kash to which honey and sweet herbs were added) the groom could drink for one month after the wedding. Because the calendar was lunar based, this month was referred to as the “honey moon”.
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