Gramer girl here, I'm Minion Fogarty. I'm on this show we talk about writing, history,

rules and cool stuff.

Today, I have a segment about the phrase out of pocket written by Neil Whitman.

In July 2015, a listener named Barb Mindel posted a question on my Facebook page. She wrote,

I have recently heard a couple of my friends from the north-eastern states used the term

out of pocket to refer to the fact that they were unavailable. What is the origin of this

idiom? Well, I responded right away, saying that I'd put it on our list of things to cover.

Well, Barb, it's been a few years, but here at last is that episode on Out of Pocket.

After I wrote my short response, a commenter named Lynn Agers linked to a 2009 post on language

log written by Mark Lieberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania. A mysterious

disappearance in the news peaked Lieberman's curiosity about why Out of Pocket is used to mean

unreachable. South Carolina governor Mark Sanford was nowhere to be found, not answering his phone

or returning his emails. Both his publicist and a state senator described him as Out of Pocket.

It later turned out he'd been in South America during his Out of Pocketry, having an affair

with an Argentinian woman. Like Barb, Lieberman was puzzled by this meaning of Out of Pocket,

and looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. He found that the OED's earliest citation was from

a 1908 short story by O Henry called Buried Treasure. The quotation went, just now she's Out of Pocket,

and I shall find her as soon as I can. Lieberman's post on Out of Pocket received several dozen

comments in the weeks after it was published, and Lynn was from Jan Freeman, who at the time

wrote a language column for the Boston Globe. Freeman quoted from a piece she'd written in 1997.

In this piece, she first nodded to the meaning that's probably more familiar to most of you.

Out of Pocket refers to expenses you cover yourself, as opposed to expenses that are paid by someone

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