And let the credit card go?

Well, I hate to be pedantic and argumentative, as you know. However, a credit card is a tool for those of the carpe diem mentality, and, had they been around,  Khayyam would have used it to buy his wine, and probably his women. The poet, had he been an accountant, would have said that he wanted the asset (a debit) of cash, rather than an IOU, or debtor (a future asset which may not be realised).

A credit card, as Mrs Dreyfuss says in The Apartment, is for those who would buy now and pay later. Khayaam wanted to receive now, on earth, rather than receive later, in heaven.

You are the wrong side of the ledger account. But then you are American, and, among other things, drive on the wrong side of the road - the right hand side, or credit side.

Here in Blighty, we Drive on the left, and Crash on the right.

What? All because I  merely wanted to add a sooterkins of updated wit to the famous Khayyam line as rendered by Edward FitzGerald, distantly related as he and I both may be to those of Castle Glin?

I made it the kind of thing one mugger might say to another mugger while their huggermuggering victim is attempting vainly to conceal his assets:  "Quick, take the cash, and let the credit card go."

"You are the wrong side of the ledger account. But then you are American..."

Yes, that's what they kept insisting in KGB training. Remember, they told me, and never forget: you are American.

As for ledgers, double-entry bookkeeping and I go back as far as Luca Pacioli -- he and Piero the Painter and I made quite a trio (triumvirate, threesome, trine, trinity) all the way from Monterchi to Arezzo and back in the old days. And I've kept up with Generally-Accepted Accounting Principles in the centuries since, what with those classes in continuing accounting education that are now mandatory for those of us who are certified. I remember the last class I had -- it was on Christy Malry's Own Double-Entry, a book carefully mentioned years ago at Jihad Watch. How soon, Mary, do we apparently forget.

I made it the kind of thing one mugger might say to another mugger while their huggermuggering victim is attempting vainly to conceal his assets

That sounds suspiciously like the voice of experience. So that was you that time in New York who stripped me of my assets? You and your partners in crime Luca Pacioli and Christy Malry?

(I have by no means forgotten Christy Malry - you introduced us.)

Anyway, I'm bored with double entry. I'm going to swap the debits and credits round just out of cussedness. Or, better still, start a system of triple entry: debit, credit, whatever.