Hi Frank,

As to the spelling question I reckon it's another case of parallel language evolution. Both the UK and the USA variants of English have been evolving in their own directions for hundreds of years. Spelling gelled in Britain earlier than in the US but the French variants became popular on this side of the Atlantic. Thus cheque/check with the French spelling being ch&egrave;que. There's a tendency for both "sides" to tell the other they're wrong. I try to resist this personally.

Thanks for the explanation of "duplex check". I don't think anything like this has existed here. We simply note things like the date, payee and amount on a stub which remains in the cheque book after the cheque has been torn out, and tally them up from there.

In my case I use electronic transfer for almost everything these days. If my kids ask for money for Christmas they get it that way. I did create fake "Bank of Dad" notes for Christmas 2014 just for fun, so they had something tangible! For Christmas 2015 I didn't bother.
