"Goes Off"

[Martin Kaminer]

My 11-year-old-son, bound to be a linguist of renown, asked me about
use of the word 'off' to mean something closer to 'on'.  The specific
case was the hopeless attempt by the hapless alarm system installer to
explain to my wife (not a native English speaker) how to avoid running
afoul of the thing herself.  Whenever he talked about the alarm 'going
off' she assumed he meant 'disarmed' whereas of course he meant quite
the opposite.

If anyone can comment on the larger linguistic/etymological phenomenon
at work here it would be greatly appreciated (and go a long way
towards shoring up my son's already faltering admiration for his
father's skills at dialectal analysis).

TX

MK

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