Originally posted by Iconoclast
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Before I quote the letter, may I remind you that Barrat has said for some years that "one off" originally meant a quantity of one in patternmaking, probably derived from the concept of casting [x number] off a pattern, where, in this case, x = 1. He cited an 1885 book on pattern making which contained the information that, to prevent mistakes, a printed label was sometimes stuck on a pattern to say e.g. "Number off: Two" this would then be referred to as 2 off (or, of course, 1 off, as the case might have been).
What happened in 1893 was that the pattern maker made a pattern making joke about this practice on the basis that it had obviously been appreciated that to cast 1 off involved a more expensive process than casting, say, 1000 off. So when writing to the editor for a back issue of a pattern making journal, he wrote:
"I hope you will be able to "cast" me the January number, but do not make the usual charge for "one off"."
The quotes around "cast" and "one off" indicate that they are being used in a way different to normal.
What must be obvious to you - and would be obvious to any expert in the English language - is that the author of the letter did not say that he hoped the editor will "not make the usual charge for a "one off"? Why not? This is five years after the diary author is supposed to have casually spoken and written of "a one off instance". Why was the letter writer using what must have been a very familiar expression by now in an odd and unusual way.
The answer is because he was simply talking about a quantity. There is no indication from the context that he's referring to anything unique or not to be repeated. If anything, "one off" here means something expensive. And, indeed, in theory, a "one off job" could have acquired the meaning of an expensive job so that a "one off event" could have come to mean an expensive event. It would be a mistake for you to read into that letter the modern meaning of the term "one off" because that is not present in what was being communicated.
Cherry-pick from the masses of evidence posted by Barrat as you may, but the fact that the letter is expressed in that way, five years after 1888, demonstrates as clearly as anything can that a figurative expression such as "it was a one off instance" was nowhere near entering the English language in the year of the Ripper murders. The language needed to evolve. "one off" needed to acquire the meaning of uniqueness and unrepeatability before it could be used in any wider, figurative or metaphorical expressions. The very fact that we have zero examples of anything even close to "one off instance" before 1945 yet we have this pattern making joke in 1893 should tell you something.
But I repeat, give all the evidence Barrat's gathered to an expert in the English language, or ask Robert Smith to do so, and ask that expert for an opinion as to whether the "one off instance" sentence could possibly have been written in 1888.
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