As in, "I’m pulling in eighty dollars a week - cash money ! Heh, I didn’t realize the term was so old.
astro
April 27, 2004, 5:05am
2
Pleonasm or tautological redundancy? Only the Beaver knows for sure.
JohnT
April 27, 2004, 5:13am
3
Exactly why this place is worth a mere $4.95/year. Thanks!
[Mandy Patinkin] I do no’ think tha’ came out in quite the way you meant for it to. [/Mandy Patinkin]
It took me a moment to figure out what you were saying here. I finally realized that you must think that “cash money” is a relatively new term used in counterpoint to credit or debit cards and other electronic forms of money. (Much as we now have to use the term “acoustic guitar” instead of just plain guitar.)
But it’s my understanding that the phrase is very, very old. You used “cash money” as an alternative to barter, for goods that were special or store bought or just not obtainable in the normal course of daily life.
Here are a couple of examples of what I mean:
From the July 1, 1991 New Yorker :
Indian Jim and Louie also call to mind the term “Bowery bum,” and, in fact, the Bowery was a haunt of theirs in the years before most of its bars and flophouses were driven out of business by the northward spread of Chinatown and the eastward spread of SoHo. By Indian Jim’s lights, though, Louie’s devotion to liquor fails a crucial test. Louie keeps cats, and every now and then, when he has exhausted the local garbage dumps and other free sources of supply, he has been known to go down to the Pathmark and buy a few cans of cat food, at twenty-five cents apiece. Indian Jim takes the position that wine is the only product justifying an outlay of cash money. “I’m the only real alcoholic up here,” he likes to say.
http://chandra.bgsu.edu/~stoner/wright.htm
A quick history of the Whiskey Rebellion helps in understanding Zadock’s bit part in it. In the few years following the Revolution, there was little hard currency in western Pennsylvania, but then the farmers didn’t need “cash money” since they could produce almost all of their necessities of life. There wasn’t a local market for their surplus grain, so they converted it to whiskey, which could be more easily transported and traded for the “store bought” necessities like salt. There were many more distilleries in western Pennsylvania than flour mills – a total of 23 stills in one township alone. Barter with whiskey meant cash was only necessary for large transactions, like purchases of land or luxuries. This all changed when the new federal government, in need of revenue, imposed an excise tax on each gallon of whiskey produced. The tax payment had to be in currency, not whiskey. The farmers rebelled because they realized the only way most of them could get the money to pay the excise tax was by mortgaging their farms. The situation was different for the farmers in politically powerful eastern Pennsylvania, where there were nearby cash markets for grain, so that whiskey production was not such a necessity there. Any cash in western Pennsylvania would quickly make it’s way back east to pay for manufactured goods available from there.
Neither is a contemporaneously old source, but that’s the original use of the term.
Yogi Berra in one of the Aflack duck commercials (in the barbershop):
“They pay you cash, which is just as good as money!”
The duck looks stupified.
