From a girl here, this week I have a quick and dirty tip about based off versus based on.

A piece about the command make me a sandwich.

Isn't ambiguous or grammatically incorrect?

And a tidbit about pronouncing the number zero as O.

People said that when I started teaching I would be appalled by the horrendous student writing that would cross my desk.

And I'm happy to report that so far that hasn't been true.

I've been teaching journalism graduate students, so you would expect them to be good writers and they are.

So far I've let it sheltered teaching life.

But the one thing that has jumped out at me is how many of my students and also people I just hear in the halls say based off instead of based on as in I believe we're all doomed based off what I saw last night.

Instead of I believe we're all doomed based on what I saw last night.

I'm usually skeptical when other people report hearing some new error that annoys them because when you do research you almost always find that people have been saying the annoying thing for a long time.

I applied that same skepticism to myself and I was very surprised to find that it does look as if people saying based off is relatively new as far as language change goes.

There was a dramatic spike in the number of people saying based off instead of based on in the mid 1990s at least in Google books which mostly includes edited text.

So people were probably saying it earlier because it takes a while for non standard usages to make it into books and just for books to be published in general.

I still should have heard it before 2014 but it's not 100 years old either and the chart of the increase looks like some Silicon Valley startup growth chart like a hockey stick.

Also when you click on the older data points in the chart they tend to be sentences in which the word based is next off but for some of the reason for example a 2001 networking book talks about a hardware based off the shelf product.

I can't tell you why people started using the wrong phrase English prepositions are often idiomatic which means that there's no logical reason why we use one instead of the other.

When people ask why New Yorkers say they stood online when almost everyone else says they stood in line the only answer I have is that it's a regionalism.

And when people ask whether they should say they are in a restaurant or at a restaurant all I can tell them is either is fine.

I can tell you that the correct standard English phrase is based on and when you compare the Google book and Graham results for based off and based on you reassuringly find that based on is still vastly more popular.

Stick with saying that your assumptions are based on what you saw last night but don't be surprised if you start hearing people use based off it is on the rise.

And that was your quick and dirty tip.

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