The Diary—Old Hoax or New?

[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.

[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

[harry]

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

[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?

[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