A collection of the (mostly) true origins of familiar phrases
BROKE
Banking customers in post-Renaissance Europe were not issued plastic credit cards, since plastics had not yet been discovered. Instead, they carried small porcelain "borrower's tiles" imprinted with their names, their bank's name, and their credit limits. In the days of face-to-face transactions and immediate accounting, these tiles provided the banks with much more security than their plastic descendants do. For each time the customer presented his tile, the draft amount would be checked against the imprinted limit. If the teller found that the limit had been reached, he would physically break the card on the spot. This method of preventing excessive overdrafts gave us the expression broke as a synonym for "without sufficient funds."
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