4.5 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 10 September 2020
⏱️ 16 minutes
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0:00.0 | Gramer girl here, I'm Minion Fogarty. I'm on this show we talk about writing, history, |
0:09.2 | rules and cool stuff. |
0:11.2 | Today, I have a segment about the phrase out of pocket written by Neil Whitman. |
0:17.3 | In July 2015, a listener named Barb Mindel posted a question on my Facebook page. She wrote, |
0:23.9 | I have recently heard a couple of my friends from the north-eastern states used the term |
0:28.2 | out of pocket to refer to the fact that they were unavailable. What is the origin of this |
0:33.8 | idiom? Well, I responded right away, saying that I'd put it on our list of things to cover. |
0:39.0 | Well, Barb, it's been a few years, but here at last is that episode on Out of Pocket. |
0:48.1 | After I wrote my short response, a commenter named Lynn Agers linked to a 2009 post on language |
0:53.9 | log written by Mark Lieberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania. A mysterious |
1:00.0 | disappearance in the news peaked Lieberman's curiosity about why Out of Pocket is used to mean |
1:06.0 | unreachable. South Carolina governor Mark Sanford was nowhere to be found, not answering his phone |
1:13.3 | or returning his emails. Both his publicist and a state senator described him as Out of Pocket. |
1:21.0 | It later turned out he'd been in South America during his Out of Pocketry, having an affair |
1:26.3 | with an Argentinian woman. Like Barb, Lieberman was puzzled by this meaning of Out of Pocket, |
1:32.8 | and looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. He found that the OED's earliest citation was from |
1:38.6 | a 1908 short story by O Henry called Buried Treasure. The quotation went, just now she's Out of Pocket, |
1:47.7 | and I shall find her as soon as I can. Lieberman's post on Out of Pocket received several dozen |
1:54.4 | comments in the weeks after it was published, and Lynn was from Jan Freeman, who at the time |
1:58.9 | wrote a language column for the Boston Globe. Freeman quoted from a piece she'd written in 1997. |
2:05.7 | In this piece, she first nodded to the meaning that's probably more familiar to most of you. |
2:11.2 | Out of Pocket refers to expenses you cover yourself, as opposed to expenses that are paid by someone |
... |
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