Invention of Credit Cards

Invention of Credit Cards What is credit? And what is a credit card? Credit is a method of selling goods or services without the buyer having cash in hand. So a credit card is simply an automatic way of offering credit to a consumer. Today, every credit card carries an identification number that speeds up shopping transactions. Imagine what a credit purchase would be like without it.  The sales person would have to record your identity, billing address and terms of repayment. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the use of credit cards originated in the United States during the 1920s, when individual firms, such as oil companies and hotel chains, began issuing them to customers. However, references to credit cards have been made as far back as 1890 in Europe. Early credit cards involved sales directly between the merchant offering the credit and credit card and that merchants customer. Around 1938, companies started to accept each others cards. Today, credit cards allow you to make purchases with countless third parties. The Shape of Credit Cards Credit cards were not always been made of plastic. Throughout history, there have been credit tokens made from metal coins, metal plates, and celluloid, metal, fiber, paper and now mostly plastic cards. First Bank Credit Card The inventor of the first bank issued credit card was John Biggins of the Flatbush National Bank of Brooklyn in New York. In 1946, Biggins invented the Charge-It program between bank customers and local merchants. The way it worked was that merchants could deposit sales slips into the bank and the bank billed the customer who used the card. Diners Club Credit Card In 1950, the Diners Club issued their credit card in the United States. The Diners Club credit card was invented by Diners  Club founder Frank McNamara as a way to pay restaurant bills. A customer could eat without cash at any restaurant that would accept Diners Club credit cards. Diners Club would pay the restaurant and the credit card holder would repay Diners Club. The Diners Club card was at first technically a charge card rather than a credit card since the customer had to repay the entire amount when billed by Diners  Club. American Express issued their first credit card in 1958. Bank of America issued the BankAmericard (now Visa) bank credit card later in 1958. The Popularity of Credit Cards Credit cards were first promoted to traveling salesmen (they were more common in that era) for use on the road. By the early 1960s, more companies offered credit cards by advertising them as a time-saving device rather than a form of credit. American Express and MasterCard became huge successes overnight. By the mid-70s, the U.S. Congress begin regulating the credit card industry by banning practices such as the mass mailing of active credit cards to those who had not requested them. However, not all regulations have been as consumer friendly. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court in case Smiley vs. Citibank lifted restrictions on the number of late penalty fees a credit card company could charge. Deregulation has also allowed very high-interest rates to be charged.

Lexeme - Definition, Etymology and Examples

Lexeme s In linguistics, a lexeme is the fundamental unit of the lexicon (or word stock) of a language. Also known as a  lexical unit,  lexical item,  or  lexical word. In corpus linguistics, lexemes are commonly referred to as lemmas. A lexeme is oftenbut not alwaysan individual word (a simple lexeme or dictionary word, as its sometimes called). A single dictionary word (for example, talk) may have a number of inflectional forms or grammatical variants (in this example, talks, talked, talking). A multiword (or composite) lexeme is a lexeme made up of more than one orthographic  word, such as a phrasal verb (e.g., speak up;  pull through), an open compound (fire engine;  couch potato), or an idiom (throw in the towel;  give up the ghost). The way in which a lexeme can be used in a sentence is determined by its word class or grammatical category. Etymology From the Greek, word, speech Examples and Observations A lexeme is a unit of lexical meaning, which exists regardless of any inflectional endings it may have or the number of words it may contain. Thus, fibrillate, rain cats and dogs, and come in are all lexemes, as are elephant, jog, cholesterol, happiness, put up with, face the music, and hundreds of thousands of other meaningful items in English. The headwords in a dictionary are all lexemes.(David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2003) Specifications of Lexemes [A] lexeme is a linguistic item defined  by the following specifications, which make up what is called the lexical entry for this item: its sound form and its spelling (for languages with a written standard);the grammatical category of  the lexeme (noun,  intransitive verb, adjective, etc.);its inherent grammatical properties (for some languages, e.g. gender);the set of grammatical forms it may take, in particular, irregular forms;its lexical meaning.These specifications apply to both simple and composite lexemes.(Sebastian Là ¶bner,  Understanding Semantics. Routledge, 2013) The Meanings of Lexemes Definitions are an attempt to characterize  the meaning or sense of a lexeme and to distinguish the meaning of the lexeme concerned from the meanings of other lexemes in the same semantic field, for example, the elephant from other large mammals. There is  a sense in which a definition characterizes the potential meaning of a lexeme; the meaning only becomes precise  as it is actualized in a context. Since the division of the meaning of a lexeme into senses is based on the variation of meaning perceived  in different contexts, a tension exists in lexicography between the recognition of separate senses and the potentiality of meaning found in definitions. This may well account in large part for the divergence  between  similar-sized dictionaries in the number of senses recorded and in consequent differences of definition.(Howard Jackson and  Ã¢â‚¬Å½Etienne Zà © Amvela,  Words, Meaning and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English Lexicology, 2nd ed. Continuum, 200 5) Invariable and Variable Lexemes In many cases, it makes no difference whether we take a syntactic or a lexical perspective. Lexemes such as the and and are invariable, i.e., there is only one word corresponding to each. Also invariable are lexemes like efficiently: although more efficiently is in some respects like harder, it is not a single word, but a sequence of two, and hence efficiently and more efficiently are not forms of a single lexeme. Variable lexemes, by contrast, are those which have two or more forms. Where we need to make clear that we are considering an item as a lexeme, not a word, we will represent it in bold italics. Hard, for example, represents the lexeme which has hard and harderand also hardestas its forms. Similarly are and is, along with be, been, being, etc., are forms of the lexeme be. . . . A variable lexeme is thus a word-sized lexical item considered in abstraction from grammatical properties that vary depending on the syntactic construction in which it appears.(Rodney Huddleston and G eoffroy Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press, 2002) Pronunciation: LECK-seem