How did this phrase come to mean, at least be used now and then, as meaning that the drink/product/service will be on the house?
It sounds as though there are negative implications of your business in the establishment in general, yet you’ll still be allowed your drink/product/service, but it’s paid for by the house.
Why?
If you say “your kind is no good here” it definately means for you to get the hell out of there.
But why do you continue to get service, for free, if your money is no good there?
Language – especially idiomatic language – is under no obligation to be logical. Someone started using the phrase to mean, “I’ll serve you but I won’t take your money” and it caught on.
Very often the literal meaning of a phrase is not the same as its usage.
When I was younger, I always thought it meant something negative like, “your money’s no good here, instead I want you to do the dishes to pay for your meal.” It took me a while to catch on to that idiom.
Often when people are offered to be treated, they politely try to turn down the invitation.
The phrase is a jocularly gruff way of insisting that they take the treat. They are being told that, since they are unable to pay themselves, they have no choice but to accept the hospitality. It’s a way to cut off argument.
I always figured this was a case of an older NEGATIVE catchphrase being turned on its head, and used in a positive way.
That is, in the Old West, if a scruffy, undesirable-looking person walked into a saloon, he might have been told sternly, “Your money’s no good here,” as in “We don’t intend to serve you, so get lost.”
In the Old South, a black man seeking to eat at a resturant or shop at a whites-only store might have been told the same thing. In that situation, "Your money’s no good here "meant, “I don’t care if you have money to spend, YOU are not welcome here.”
Over time, those practices have largely vanished, but people remembered the old phrase, and started using it in a different way. If, for example, a bunch of guys are taking a buddy out to a resytaurant or bar for his birthday, they may tell him, “You money’s no good here,” meaning “Tonight, you don’t pay for anything, it’s all on us.”
I think astorian’s got it. It originally meant, “You’re not welcome here.” Later, it was used in a mock-hostile manner to mean “It’s my treat,” because guys like to show their love with their fists.
Does anyone have any evidence of the phrase being used in a hostile or exclusionary way? I have never heard it used like that, and as Reality Chuck points out, idioms don’t have to make logical sense, so the fact that that “should” be the source of it is irrelevant.
I’m with Colibri. I’ve never heard of it having been a negative, exclusionary phrase that then turned positive, although that seems a reasonable theory. I came up dry when I checked the usual online phrase-origin websites, FWIW.
A variant I’ve heard is “Put your money away, it’s no good here.”
I never doubted there were and are such contemporary uses. My question was whether that was the original use of the phrase, and later becoming a friendly but stubborn insistence on treating someone.
First use in Google Books is from Jack London, interestingly, in a hobo story published in The Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1908.
Clearly a negative connotation. This bit shows up in The Road a few years later (which book I’ve actually read, and is actually a fascinating book by a great writer).
I feel marginally vindicated now. When I was younger, my siblings and parents used to kid me about my misunderstanding of this phrase. They didn’t seem to get that it could be negative.