A cache of arms not a cachet: commonly confused words (11-12)
What’s the issue?
People sometimes use cachet when cache is required. Despite having five letters in common, and coming ultimately from the same French verb (cacher, ‘to hide’, in the case of cache), in English they are completely unrelated in meaning.
A cache of something is ‘a hidden store of weapons, provisions, treasure. etc.’ and ‘the place where such a store is hidden’. Typical caches are an arms cache or a cache of weapons/arms/explosives/munitions/ammunition. In non-military contexts, you might find a cache of letters/documents and a cache of treasures/ivory. Caches of things may be discovered unexpectedly, or may be used to conceal something illegal or suspect:
a cache of personal letters, diaries and photos from the Himmler family, long secreted in private collections in Israel and recently brought to light.
Last month nine poachers were arrested after rangers tracked them to a cache of ivory hidden in the park.
The word is pronounced exactly like cash.
Cachet is ‘prestige, high status; the quality of being respected or admired’ and rhymes with sachet.
Mechanical chronographs have had a certain cool guy cachet since the late 60s, when most of the iconic models were designed.
The next two examples show the two words being used correctly:
Several inmates seized a cache of grenades and other weapons and killed six security officers, including a high-ranking counterterrorism official;
The department stores knew they had to offer something different, something perceived to have more cachet.
In this next one, cachet is wrong, and cache would be correct: Egyptian excavators this week chanced upon a cachet of limestone reliefs.
Some people also write caché for cachet. Presumably they have head the word, twig that it is French, but have never seen it written and take a guess at how to spell it.
Here’s an example:
At The Republic of East Vancouver, we tried to capitalize on this caché of East Vancouver, believing that everyone more or less knows it as a different place with a different state of mind, not just as a geographical designation.
A brief history
Cache
Cache is a word English owes to North American English and to the history of exploration in particular. It is first attested from 1797 in the journals, in English, of a Canadian fur trader and explorer, Charles Jean Baptiste Chaboillez. It is a borrowing of the French feminine noun cache, meaning ‘hiding place.’ As the OED explains, it was first used primarily by American explorers to mean ‘a hole or mound’ made to hide provisions, and the store of provisions hidden therein. In Chaboillez and early citations it is anglicised to cash.
I took advantage of a detached heap of stones,.. to make a cache of a bag of pemmican.
G. Back, Narrative of the Arctic land expedition to the mouth of the Great Fish River, iv. 129, 1836
By 1860 it had acquired its figurative meaning generally of a hiding place, especially for treasure:
The little cache on the Orkney sea-shore, produced 16 pound weight of silver.
C. Innes, Scotland in the Middle Ages, 1860
The computing meaning of a small, high-speed memory, dates to 1968.
cachet
This is another loanword from French, derived ultimately from the verb cacher, not in the meaning ‘to hide’ but ‘to press on’. The explanation for that derivation is that a cachet in French, and originally in English (before 1639), was a physical seal, as for example on a signet ring, engraved with the emblem of its wearer. In particular, it was used in the phrase lettre de cachet, a letter from the monarch securely closed with his seal impressed in wax and often imposing imprisonment or exile. The trésor de la langue française cites this striking metaphor:
Le monde n’est qu’une cire à laquelle notre esprit comme un cachet impose son empreinte.
The world is but a piece of wax on which our mind like a seal imposes its imprint.
From that highly specific meaning it developed the figurative one of ‘distinguishing mark’, first attested in Thackeray, according to the OED:
All his works [pictures] have a grand cachet: he never did anything mean.
Paris Sketch Book I. 107, 140
The original OED entry was published in 1888 (and therefore written earlier) and did not include the modern meaning of ‘prestige, high status’. As it turns out from the updated entry, that meaning was only first attested in 1882 in a US (Ohio) source so it is hardly surprising the 1888 entry did not include it.
I’ll finish with a quote from the irrepressible Julie Burchill, which coincidentally exemplifies the most frequent collocation of cachet, namely, a certain…
And there is a certain cachet in not telling.
Sex & Sensibility (1992) 55, 1988
This is an updated and expanded version of a 2014 post.
