The Diary—Old Hoax or New?

[Abby Normal]

also, Orsam Books is name of his website. i dont know the significance of Orsam though.

[harry]

Ike,
I typed 'one off' in the search box of an English paper's archived edition, specifically for 19th century usage,and came up with thousands of references.When I say 'one off' i do mean the two words together,as printed here.
Not saying 'one off' meaning as is written in the diary,I haven't began a search for that yet,but I do not really need to.It seems the term,or expression,was so common in those days,that it's quite possible a person living then could have used it in the way it was used in the diary.

[MrBarnett]

I was curious about DO’s ‘New JTR Suspect Identified!’ blog. What a load of old cobblers.

[APerno]

on Orsam, 'one-off' --I have never encounter such effort in proving a negative.

[c.d.]

I am still confused. Are David Barrat and David Orsam one and the same person or was David Barrat simply introducing an article that David Orsam wrote?

c.d.

[Abby Normal]

I am still confused. Are David Barrat and David Orsam one and the same person or was David Barrat simply introducing an article that David Orsam wrote?

c.d.

yes same

[Simon Wood]

Orsam = Awesome. It's a homophone.

[Sam Flynn]

Ike,
I typed 'one off' in the search box of an English paper's archived edition, specifically for 19th century usage,and came up with thousands of references

That's because you can have "one off the top", "one off the bottom", "one off the shelf", "one off apple in a barrel", "it puts one off the scent" etc etc. You need to look for A "one off" SOMETHING, where the "something" is an abstract entity or action, as opposed to a physical artefact.

[Yabs]

That's because you can have "one off the top", "one off the bottom", "one off the shelf", "one off apple in a barrel", "it puts one off the scent" etc etc. You need to look for A "one off" SOMETHING, where the "something" is an abstract entity or action, as opposed to a physical artefact.

That’’s quite right, a lot of the results in the search also seem to be misspellings of the word of.

For example, one top result in the search regarding rheumatic pills from 1856 has the misspelling
This preparation is one off the benefits

A different result from 1857 has the phrase

One off the largest towns

Etc etc

[harry]

Exacly Sam,but my point is, the more 'one off's' there are,the more likely it is of someone noticing it,and becoming aware of the possibilities of creating an abstract entity or action with it. Why couldn't this have happened in the late 1800's? Not an impossible scenario ,is it?

[harry]

I am quite aware there were also a largge number of misspellings.I do not include those.

[Iconoclast]

Exacly Sam,but my point is, the more 'one off's' there are,the more likely it is of someone noticing it,and becoming aware of the possibilities of creating an abstract entity or action with it. Why couldn't this have happened in the late 1800's? Not an impossible scenario ,is it?

If it wasn't for the implications in terms of the mooted hoaxed diary of Jack the Ripper, I very much doubt many people would argue overly vehemently with you on this point. If the debate was going on for a high school English lesson, I suspect more people would take the position you take and accept that the routine conjunction of 'one' and 'off' may reasonably have led to expressions along the lines of 'one off event' evolving naturally. If we had every document and every letter ever written in the late Victorian period and convenient recordings of every conversation during this time (oh for an historical Alexa), we might well find that 'one off moment' was not so psychologically (or linguistically) unbridgeable after all.

Ike

[Sam Flynn]

Exacly Sam,but my point is, the more 'one off's' there are,the more likely it is of someone noticing it,and becoming aware of the possibilities of creating an abstract entity or action with it.

It's not just a case of stitching words together on a whim - "one off [object]" has first to transition from being a specialist manufacturing industrial term into non-specialist everyday usage, which would take time in itself. After that, it then needs to mutate from "one off [object]" to "one-off [abstract thing]". There is no evidence that the latter occurred before the 20th century, and it's hard to see why or how it should have. However, during the 20th century - particularly towards its end - just about everybody was using the term in that way.

[harry]

That would apply Sam,if the transition was derived from an industrial term.There is no indication that it did.It could have,but like a great deal of the English language,origins are sometimes hard to tie down. Even if it can't be shown to have mutated before the twentieth century,c an evidence prove it didn't.
T ake the expression,'good morning alltogether'.I have only ever heard one person use it.Does that mean no one else ever has?

[Sam Flynn]

That would apply Sam,if the transition was derived from an industrial term

It did. Even if it didn't, there's no evidence that it existed before well into the 20th century, and there's plenty of evidence to show that it only became widely used in the latter part of it.