The One Off Meltdown

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Sean,

Many thanks for posting a great example ("that one off chance" meaning a single unusual - but not unique - chance) the premise for which is syntactically the same as someone stating that hitting his wife would not happen again because it was "a one off instance". Of course, James Maybrick in the James Maybrick scrapbook did exactly that and - by it, as I have stated many times and been roundly mocked for doing so - he could have meant "a one 'off' instance". If one is permitted to type (and then publish) an 'off chance' in 1883, why is one not also permitted to write an 'off instance' in 1888? I can answer my own question, of course, which is that - to agree to this premise - one's argument around the evidence for a hoax falls immediately away and that is not to be permitted around these here parts.

So, it may well be (though we still don't know for certain) that the expression "one-off instance" was impossible in 1888, but can we still say - in all seriousness - that the expression "one 'off' instance" was also impossible in 1888 given its syntactic equivalent used at least as early as six years beforehand?

Obviously, we all know what's coming - the denial of the possibility of syntactic equivalence (probably via lengthy posts deconstructing the term 'syntactic equivalence' - as if my choice of terminology has any bearing whatsoever on the truthfulness of the premise) from all the usual suspects (well, the two of them) so I shan't be engaging in the to-and-fro and the dance moves of making something possible appear quite impossible. I've made my point, and I'm not sure I have anything to add to it after your generous identification of the very thing I would have been looking for had I arsed myself to (and certainly not whilst simultaneously watching Celtic versus St. Mirren now that the Scottish season has started).

I'll just end by reminding everyone of something which I think Caz first noted - namely, that if the expression used in the scrapbook was meant to convey "a one-off instance" then it is immediately followed by a tautology as the next claim is (the equivalent of) "Never to be repeated" - whereas no such tautology leads from "a one 'off' instance" as it is a claim that the instance was simply unusual or out-of-character rather than necessarily 'unique'. So James Maybrick writing that hitting his wife was nothing but an abhorrent instance fits perfectly with his following claim that it will not happen again. If you don't like his use of "a one", by the way, you should spend more time in northern England where it is perfectly common to create redundancy by using the two words together. My own mother used it all her life. If I said to her (as I frequently did), "Would you like a cup of tea, Mam?", she'd say to me, "Yes, I would love a one". I take it that a Scouser in the nineteenth century may well have been no different to a Geordie in the twentieth century in this respect (and - even if you don't accept such redundancy as being a common feature of northern dialects, I would remind you all that this was just someone writing and not all appropriate literary conventions can be assumed of someone writing their thoughts as they come to them).

So thank you for that, Sean. Anyone old enough to remember, for example, the certain fact that Michael Maybrick did not write lyrics? That didn't age well, now did it? And yet it was commonly trumpeted as all the evidence we all needed in order to know the scrapbook was a hoax. As usual, the 'killer blow' that exposes the hoax falls apart under a little scrutiny (but watch out for the frantic spluttering of the naysaying classes - any moment now...).

Ike

An 'off chance" is a long-established noun in the English dictionary, Ike, going back to the 1830s:

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/off-chance_n?tl=true

There is no such thing, however, as an "off instance" and never has been:

https://www.oed.com/search/dictionar...q=off+instance

That's the difference.

[Herlock Sholmes]

The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest use of 'off chance' to Bell's Life in London and Sporting Chronicle in 1839. This origin would tend to link the use of the phrase to gambling slang.

On the other hand the phrase 'off instance', well the OED has 0 results for "off instance".

Exactly Sean. It doesn’t exist. It’s an invention.