What's "good money"?

Hey Matt:

Where did the saying "good money" come from, as in, "I paid good money for that car"?

-- Dawn, the net

People might just mean "a lot of money" when they say good money. But there's no telling what the word experts will come up with, so we shoved your question under their office door in the Unexplained Phenomena wing of Alice Industries, LLC, across from the ladies room. Eventually we got back a request for three large pepperoni pizzas and a scrawled note that suggests "good money" comes from the longer phrase, "throwing good money after bad." That's when you spend a bunch of money on something like, say, replacing the alternator on that car for which you paid good money, but once it's replaced the clunker still won't run. So the mechanic suggests a new fix. You pay for the new repair, but that doesn't work either. After paying for fix number three, you might ask yourself, "Should I throw good money (money in my pocket) after bad (money already spent that didn't fix the problem), or should I just sell the clunker to some unsuspecting passer-by?" It's no surprise that your example involves a car.