This is how good words go bad.

Start with a perfectly good word.  Take, for example, “cacher,” which comes from the Latin “coactare – to constrain” and which in French means “to hide or conceal.”  But a lot depends on who is doing the concealing.  If you or I were to hide something, we’d just be keeping a lot of crap out of sight.  But if Louis-the-Fourteenth hides it, oh very well then and la-di-freakin’-da.  If the King puts a secret into a letter, and then has it sealed with wax, then that letter has the royal stamp on it, so it has gained a certain, um, “cachet.”  And that means a lot.  Cachet.  It means Mercedes, Yves St. Laurent, and Remy Martin.  It’s cool.  No, it’s way more expensive than cool.  It’s Cachet, two syllables.

But let’s see what happens if a different sort of person has the Gaul to make “cacher” his own.  Take, for example, a French trapper, circa 1650, who is exploring the North American interior, slamming back some bourbon, doing what-all with the natives, and finding himself in a nasty pinch every now and then.  Perhaps this Black-Jacques-Shellac might need to unload some gold in a safe place where no one but he will ever find it.  In that case, he makes a quick “cache” in the wilderness, a hole in the ground filled with his junk, for the next time he passes through.  It’s grubby, it’s gross.  Cache.  That word, with its criminal under-tones, has infected the Computer Age, and today the “cache” of the computer means all those grubby old files, those websites you shouldn’t have visited, the flame-mail you shouldn’t have drafted.  It’s not cool.  Really, it’s not cool at all.  It’s Cache, one syllable, and it sounds – not surprisingly – like “cash.

So, two words almost exact to a “t”  but so diametrically opposed.  And there’s the problem.  With so little to differentiate them, they are tailor-made for confusion, and for hilarity.  Need some elegant women’s clothes? Head on over to cache.com (for great clothes good enough to lay down in.) Or read the Daily News’ review of “MacGruber,” and you’ll find that the film has a certain “pop culture cache” (especially to troglodytes).  This week when Barron’s reported on Starbuck’s merger with Green Mountain Coffee, they concluded that “The Starbucks brand lends new cache to Green Mountain’s market power and patents.”  (Yummy, ground coffee!) And even Forbes, reporting just yesterday on why P Diddy will become the first hip-hop billionaire, they attributed much of that value to his Ciroc brand of vodka, which “has that cache in the market.”

OK, the Daily News screwing up?  Understandable.  But Barron’s and Forbes?  That makes it official:  very few people understand the difference between something of quality, and a hole in the ground.