Originally posted by Iconoclast
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Even "freshly picked" isn't really an expression, but we can find plenty of examples of it from the nineteenth century. There must be thousands of nouns we can add after "freshly picked" which have never been recorded in a sentence before, but that doesn't mean they couldn't have been used in the nineteenth century. Freshly picked sparrows for example. I doubt you'll find a recorded example of this before today but it's still an English sentence which anyone could have created in history.
"One off" is not only an extremely useful expression, for which we can find literally millions of twentieth and twenty-first century examples (with none in the nineteenth century), but, as part of the phrase "one off instance", it requires "one off" words to bear the meaning of "unique" or "unrepeatable", which simply wasn't the case in 1888, which is how we know the diary is a fake.
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