A Case Quarter

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Beverly calling from Midlopie in Texas.

Hello, Beverly. Welcome.

Hi, Beverly.

Hi.

What’s going on?

You can’t believe what?

I found your station by accident.

I drive a truck for a living, and I’ve run into it twice out on the road.

Just because of what I do, I’m not in an area very long, and I lose the reception.

So to have found it twice, I’m such a word nerd, I just loved it.

Hi, excellent. A word nerd and a truck driver.

What are you hauling?

Just about everything under the sun, yeah.

-huh.

I drive an 18-wheel truck.

-huh, cool.

Well, glad to help.

What can we do for you today?

Well, years ago, I worked in a retail kind of venue, and, well, it was the military’s PX system.

I was the manager at the checkout, and a woman came through my line, and I rang up all of things.

And then when I was giving her a change back, she said that she wanted a case quarter.

And I thought she wanted like a roll of quarters.

So I was directing her back to the cashier’s area where she could get, you know, change or whatever she wanted.

And she got kind of angry with me that she kept saying, no, I just want a case quarter.

And I said, I, you know, I’m not really sure what you’re talking about.

And she just kept getting angrier and angrier.

And later on, you know, after she tried to calm down a little bit, I guess, she kind of explained to me what that was.

Have you ever heard that term before?

Case quarter, and you’re spelling that C-A-S-E quarter?

That’s what I assumed.

-huh.

Yeah, I know it from my reading, but it’s not something that my family ever used.

I had never heard it before or since.

I’m from Southern California, from the Huntington Beach area.

She sounded to me like she was from the South, so I thought maybe it was a southern kind of thing that they got out.

So what did you hear about it?

I don’t know where I was reading it, perhaps in Faulkner or Zora Neale Hurston or someplace like that, because this term is so closely allied with the south, the two Carolinas, North and South Carolina in particular, but it’s also popped up in Georgia and Tennessee and Kentucky and here and there.

Well, I was in Arizona at the time.

Oh, were you now?

And the person on the other side of the counter was young or old, black or white?

She seemed to me like she was probably mid-20s at the time.

And she was a black woman, a white woman?

She was a black woman.

Okay, yeah, that’s why I asked, because it’s one of those terms that’s so closely allied with the speech of black Americans, at least in the last few decades.

Although it didn’t start out the way, most of the authorities that you ask about this question will tell you that it probably comes from an older word, caser, C-A-S-E-R, which meant a crown, which is a type of British coin worth about five shillings.

I bet she never knew that.

Yeah, no, probably not.

That’s the way of language.

We often don’t know the roots of the words that we speak every day.

And kaiser in turn probably came from an old Yiddish word, which also meant the same thing, a crown.

And so the idea here is that this word kaiser was shortened to case, and it’s had an interesting life.

For example, have you ever heard of the game pharaoh, F-A-R-O?

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s a kind of card game.

I’ve heard of it.

Yeah, it’s a kind of card game.

In that game, I believe this lingo is still used.

It was as of the 1970s.

Case money or case dough is the last money that you have to bet.

It’s the very last.

And also in that game, a case card is the fourth and last of any denomination, for example, of a card that you might draw.

For example, if you draw the last ace, that’s the case ace.

And so we have a couple different kind of connecting paths here where this caser comes in from money, and you get this idea from gambling where it refers to the very last of something or the definitive one of it.

In any case, just to clarify here, a case quarter means that you have an actual quarter with Washington on it and not five nickels, right?

What I finally found out from her.

Okay.

So in any case, to summarize it all up, it probably goes back to that old language for a British coin, a caser.

That is so interesting.

So now you know.

A case quarter is a whole coin.

I really appreciate that help.

You know, I had known that, but I was going, you know, I have never heard of this before.

And then when I heard this program, that was the first thing that came to my mind.

I don’t know what this is all about.

Thank you for giving us a ring, and good luck on the road, okay?

Take care of yourself.

Right.

Thank you.

You have a nice holiday.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Well, do you have a story about the word that you grew up speaking, and then you moved to another part of the country, and nobody knows what you’re talking about?

Call us and talk about it.

1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.