"walk-away money"

[Joel S. Berson]

The bottom line is that none of the two or three senses supposed for
"walk-away", n. attrib., is in the OED.  The phrase "walk-away money"
perhaps deserves its own additional entry.

Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>I see two meanings in active use. Which one, to you, is transparent?
>
>I see it refer to money you take to walk away; I also see it as money you
>leave on the table -- you walk away from -- in a sales context.

I see I forgot to give the quotation I had encountered, thinking it
was so transparent!  Forty workers at a metal manufacturing firm
purchased a number of Massachusetts lottery tickets, and one paid off
$1 million.  They will "take home" between $4,000 and $20,000,
depending on their varying contributions.  One of the winners said:

"Nobody gets walk-off money.  But we got a lot of nice Christmases
coming up now."

This I think is Dan's first meaning -- the money is not enough to
retire (from the metal-working job) on.  "If I were offered that
little money to retire, I would walk away from the table."

At 11/23/2013 02:51 PM, Galen Buttitta wrote:
>I see it in the sense of *Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?* when Regis would
>give a contestant the option to walk away with the money.

That's Dan's first meaning, and (as I say) I think also my example.

>On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> > Subject:      Re: "walk-away money"
> >
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > I usually see the first one, but not the second. The first is sometimes
> > used to describe a settlement in a nuisance suit or an amount promised
> > to be either paid or refunded in case a proposed merger or acquisition
> > falls apart. E.g., T-Mobile got guaranteed cash infusion upfront from
> > the attempted merger with AT&T, but AT&T got some walk-away money when
> > the regulators killed the merger.
> >
> > The second sense DG proposes sounds to me like "acceptable losses".
> > Given this perfectly adequate terminology, I can't imagine frequent use
> > of the alternative.

I'm with Victor about Dan's second sense.  I can see the phrase used
verbally -- "I walked away from it" -- but not as a
noun-attributive.  (Dan didn't indicate whether the walker-away was
the buyer or the seller, but presumably it can be either -- the
amount could be too high for the buyer or too low for the seller.

Joel

> >
> >      VS-)
> >
> > On 11/23/2013 1:22 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
> > > I see two meanings in active use. Which one, to you, is transparent?
> > >
> > > I see it refer to money you take to walk away; I also see it as money you
> > > leave on the table -- you walk away from -- in a sales context.
> > >
> > > DanG
> > >
> > >
> > > On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> > >
> > >> "Walk-away money" -- transparent in meaning, but I don't see
> > >> "walk-away" (presumably an attributive?) in this sense in the
> > >> OED.  It's not included in "walk-away  n." under "walk, v."
> > >>
> > >> Presumably akin to "walk-off" (as in baseball), which has been
> > >> discussed recently.  Looking in the OED, I don't see the baseball
> > >> sense (can't remember whether that's been discussed).
> > >>
> > >> Googling Web and Books for "walk-away money", I see only this before
> > 2001:
> > >> [PDF]  (026-037)PMM Employees 9/25/00 11:20 AM Page 26
> > >>
> > >>
> >
> https://tice.agroparistech.fr/coursenligne/courses/SOCIOLOGIEETMANAGEME/document/mergers%20and%20acquisition/Peopleprobleminmergers2000McKinsey.pdf?cidReq=SOCIOLOGIEETMANAGEME
> > >> The most important factor to consider when you are trying to retain
> > >> and motivate people is how much "walk-away" money they receive from the
> > >> merger.
> > >>
> > >> I have not tried to find "walk-away" in the same sense but not with
> > >> "money".  There is the usual problem of hyphen = space.
> > >>
> > >> Joel
> >
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> >
>
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