Off: a very versatile three-letter word

 

Is this milk off?

Prepositions in English are found everywhere. They usually help us clarify what we want to say and give us an extra dimension in some expressions. But this is probably more for the benefit of native English speakers, because for those learning English as a second or third language, it can pose a nightmare.

How to explain the misery of a preposition to native English speakers, so that they get the idea that it’s not as easy as they think? In this article, I will try to enlighten readers to understand how annoying prepositions can be, and why we need to sympathise with learners when they attempt to use them.

Let us take the humble preposition off and see what devastation this can wreak. In fact, let us add the verb to be.

Without providing any context, what could be the difference between these phrases?

A.      He’s off.

B.      It’s off.

Well… a huge one, actually. And not just one meaning per phrase. So I will try to put more context in them now:

A.      Phone call: “Hi, can I speak to Max?” – “Sorry, he’s off until the end of the week.”

“Pete’s switched off his computer, so I guess he’s off now.”

The first suggests Max is on holiday, the second that Pete is leaving the office. In English, native speakers understand these and use these without thinking, but learners really have a lot of work to do to grasp this.

 

B.      “Don’t drink the milk in the fridge, I think it’s off.”

Restaurant: “Could I have the eggs benedict, please?” – “Sorry, it’s off today, but it’ll be back again tomorrow.”

Here, the first one means that the milk is no longer drinkable, and in the second, it means that item is not available that day. Again, native speakers use these expressions effortlessly, but learners probably understand passively but would rarely use them.

And this is just the use of “be off” without an object… if you look carefully at the cases above, they don’t actually act as true prepositions at all, they are more like adjectives. However, if we think of other verbs that precede “off”, we can see that the preposition fundamentally changes the meaning of the verb.

PULL OFF:

A.      Would you like to pull off a piece of my cake?

B.      It was such an amazing trick – nobody thought he would pull off such a feat!

C.      I’m going to pull off the road for a short break.

 

CUT OFF:

A.      The arrogant presenter cut off his guests several times during the interview.

B.      The entire region was cut off by the floods.

C.      To make your dress the right length, I need to cut off about 20 cm.

 

TURN OFF:

A.      To get to our house, turn off at junction 14 and take the first exit at the roundabout.

B.      Your horrible perfume is enough to turn off a sailor 100 miles out to sea!

C.      Please turn off the lights before you leave.

(Solutions to all the meanings at the bottom)

 

Sometimes, what we can also do to some of these verbs is move the order around a bit, to give it a little more emphasis. To demonstrate, we will look at the same scenario but in three different contexts:

 

TURN ON:

A.      I think it’s time for the news, so I’ll turn on the TV.

B.      I think it’s time for the news, so I’ll turn the TV on.

C.      I think it’s time for the news, so I’ll turn it on.

We cannot say “turn on it” – why? Think about it, and if you need some time, don’t look at the next few lines yet.

 

So you can say “turn the TV on” or “turn on the TV” with almost the same meaning. The one word at the end signals the destination in some contexts, though. Here, with the help of bold italics to signal stress in speech, we can see how the speaker wishes to emphasise the meaning in that context.

I don’t feel like listening to music any more, I’ll turn on the TV (= a different medium)

If you want to watch something, you need to turn the TV on (= not off)

You wanted to watch TV… so turn it on, then! (=also not off)

In all three cases, the last word highlights the main object (or objective), and the word “it” is nearly never stressed, because generally pronouns like this are used when the subject the word “it” represents has already been mentioned, as in the last example above. That’s the reason you can’t say “turn on it”.

But also because “turn on it” means a couple of entirely different things… it may mean you want the other person to climb on the TV and do a pirouette. Or it may mean you want the other person to no longer consider it a friendly entity.

“The gymnast climbed onto the horizontal bar and turned on it as elegantly as always.”

“The company used to be very popular, but customers turned on it when the CEO refused a long-overdue pay rise for the staff.”

In any case, it explains quite well why Tom Jones sang “baby you can turn me on”, and not “turn on me”

 

Anyway, back to looking at “off”…

Not all phrasal verbs use objects. For example, if we use the construction “take off”, we can do the following:

A.      A. "He took off his shoes and went into the shallow water.” – removed clothing

B.      B. "He took a week off and went to Malta” – chose to spend time away from the office

C.      C. "The plane took off from Toronto Airport on schedule.” – left the ground

 

In A., we can put “off” before or after “his shoes”.

In B., we usually only put “off” after the length of time, when discussing annual leave.

In C., there is no object accompanying the phrasal verb, because the entirety of the construction means “left the ground.”

 

It can get a little confusing at times, however. Consider the phrasal verb “go off”. On one side it provides us with another meaning of “away”, which we will come to shortly.

“Go off” can also have two opposite meanings:

“At the campsite, the lights went off every night at 11.30.” – stopped working

“The fire alarm went off at the first sign of smoke.” – started working

WHAT?

I mean, how utterly confusing is that…? It almost makes anyone question why they started learning English in the first place.

But we can also use “go off” to describe someone departing, although it’s not very imaginative.

Let us look at variations of the phrase “he said goodbye and went off”, varying it each time. Using the word “went” doesn’t tell us much about how someone left, but if you change the verb, it explains the whole thing:

“He said goodbye and drove off.” – by car, as the driver

“He said goodbye and walked off.” – on foot

“He said goodbye and ran off.” – on foot, but faster

“He said goodbye and cycled off.” – on a bike

“He said goodbye and rode off.” – on a bike, a horse, or as a passenger in a vehicle

“He said goodbye and sailed off.” – in a boat with its own means of propulsion

“He said goodbye and rowed off.” – in a boat but with oars

“He said goodbye and danced off.” – maybe from a Fred Astaire film?

“He said goodbye and flew off.” – a bird gave a greeting then left the scene?

“He said goodbye and ****ed off.” – a common way to say that someone left rather abruptly

This is the reason why “off” accompanies a lot of profane verbs, because “**** off” more or less means “go away and do unspeakable things to yourself.”

So as you see, three little letters can do so much to accompany our words and enrich our communication. Don’t be afraid of “off”, just understand how it fits and what it can do for you.

 

SOLUTION:

PULL OFF:

A.      To take a piece from the main part of the cake

B.      To succeed

C.      To go to a side road

 

CUT OFF:

A.      To interrupt someone in full speech, or end a video/audio connection

B.      The entire region was cut off by the floods

C.      To make your dress the right length, I need to cut off about 20 cm

 

TURN OFF:

A.      To take another road by leaving the one you are on

B.      To repulse someone

C.      If you don’t know the meaning to this one, you should seek linguistic help!

Holy days and holidays: where did they go their separate ways?

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=677773 

All these days off recently have driven me mad: we take a day off because some character from a late-Bronze-Age science fiction book did a few implausible things with the help of quite a lot of Middle Eastern authors high on heavy herbal stimulants.

Not all of them are holy days: we have bank holidays, regional holidays, national holidays, school holidays, etc.

But why do we call them holidays, and where does the idea come from?

I was recently recovering from one of the numerous four-day weeks that plague the first half of the calendar and are conspicuous by their absence after the summer break, except for a little respite at the beginning of November. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a reduction in the working week, but their irregularity (sometimes on a Thursday, often on a Monday, really causes severe issues with my course calendar. This year is really extreme. I finish most courses in mid-June, except for those on Mondays, which don’t finish until July.

Anyway, all this made me contemplate the origins of the word holy. Stand by for a wild ride…

 

HAIL/HEALTH

One of the only words non-German speakers know from German is the word Heil. I won’t go into details why, but let’s say it preceded the name of a mad Austrian with a brushy moustache. Heil means a few things, namely “salvation” as a noun, and “safe”, “medicinal” or “healing” as an adjective, giving English the very words “heal”, “health”, and all their derivatives. This was the direct translation from Latin ave, seen in the phrase Ave Caesar, the Roman version of Heil You-Know-Whom, meaning “hail” or “wish well”.

 

WASSAIL

In Modern English, there are a lot of hangovers from the “hail” connection, for example in Midwinter, it is common to go wassailing in more folksy parts of the English-speaking world, and “wassail” comes from the Old English wæs hæil, meaning “be healthy”. Wæs, as a word, is now found in the past simple form as “was”, but many centuries ago it was the main form of the verb and the imperative. So the idea of wassailing was to wish health to one and all, as well as the nature for the coming year, in hope of fruitfulness and fecundity.

For comparison, the Dutch imperative of “to be” is wees and the German Wesen, means “being”, as in human being.

This is where it gets a bit bizarre…

 

HALIBUT

Yes, you read that right: the fish. The name comes from the fact that it was eaten on holy days, in the tradition of not eating meat. Butt in German is a flatfish like a flounder, add that to “holy” and that’s what it is: the holy flatfish.

 

HOLIDAY

So let’s cut to the chase: a “holiday” was originally a “holy day”, such as Christmas or Easter, because they were the only days that working people were allowed to take off… or were forced to take off. During the first Black Death in the 14^th century, workers gained quite a lot more rights, as there were so few healthy people still able to do anything, and so they lobbied for more “holy days”, even ones that weren’t connected to religion. Over time, “holiday” came to signify any non-working day, standing apart from “holy days”, which were days when people went to a big stone building to send telepathic messages to famous dead people and hear some of those late-Bronze-Age science fiction readings.

 

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

When any traditionalist tells you not to say “happy holidays” because it’s such a modern, non-religious invention, this is what to do: rather than punch the person on the nose, tell them the phrase actually dates from the mid-19^th century when piousness was still in fashion, and by the late 1930s was common parlance, even being used by various companies for marketing purposes, such as Camel and Coca-Cola. So it’s not a new thing – get over it, snowflakes!

 

SANCTIMONIOUSNESS

Here is a word that really stands out from the crowd. In English, as well as French and Latin, it means the ostentatious showing of your holy credentials. Being sanctimonious was and is to give the outer appearance of a do-gooder, even to the extent of criticising others for being less virtuous than you.

There are a few of these on Facebook that never stop telling us how pious they are, but sometimes it’s about the secular world too: someone in my wider professional circle was completely indifferent to our efforts in March to help Ukrainian refugees. When I approached them about it, they more or less stared straight over me and out the back to the wall. My hair was smoking for a good ten minutes from the laser-precision stare. But after a week of seeing how we were getting on, suddenly, there was an almighty change of heart, and suddenly this person was practically auditioning for Fundraiser of the Year.

Why did I bring this up? Because the Dutch, Germans and Scandinavians have a lovely word for people like this: Schijnheilig / Scheinheilig / Skinhellig. The root words of “shine” in less diluted Germanic languages double up to mean both “seem” or “appear”, and at the same time “shine” or “gleam”. This awesomely passive-aggressive word translates literally as “shine-holy”, and I love it.