Cold dry cash

One of the few drawbacks of Reina del Sur is its "cash only" policy. This made me wonder how to say "cash" in Spanish, so the GWO fired up his phone and I looked it up on Wiktionary. It's efectivo, which is not a word I recall ever coming across being used with this meaning in my life. In fact, apart from German Bargeld and Chinese/Korean 現金, all of the translations were unfamiliar to me (though at least French espèces recalled specie).

But the only one which really threw me for a loop was Irish airgead tirim, which literally means "dry money". What's so "wet" about credit? But apparently the development is "dry" > "solid" (e.g. earraí tirime "dry goods") or "bare" (e.g. de dhoirne tirime "bare-fisted"), which is also the metaphor underlying Bargeld. Irish isn't alone either: Welsh has arian sychion, where sychion is the plural of sych "dry".

This made me wonder, of course, if both Celtic languages could be calquing an earlier expression and--sure enough--the OED records "dry money" being used up until the 19th century. Le Trésor records argent sec as a synonym of argent comptant, which is perhaps better translated as "upfront" or "outright". Hard to say which way the influence goes here.