[Ads-l] "that's what they pay off on"

[George Thompson]

My father was an old-time Brooklyn guy -- born in the early 1890s -- and a
horse-player.  When he wanted to express the idea "that's what's important"
or "that's the result we want" he would often say "that's what they pay off
on".

I don't see this expression in the OED.  Thanks to the skulduggery of
the infernal Bertelsmann company, and then of the OED, I will never know
what JL had in his files.  It first turns up in the America's Historic
Newspapers files in 1910.  It first appears in the Brooklyn PL's Brooklyn
Newsstand in 1929.

GAT
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998.

But when aroused at the Trump of Doom / Ye shall start, bold kings, from
your lowly tomb. . .
L. H. Sigourney, "Burial of Mazeen", Poems.  Boston, 1827, p. 112

The Trump of Doom -- also known as The Dunghill Toadstool.  (Here's a
picture of his great-grandfather.)

https://heritagecollections.parliament.uk/collections/getrecord/HOP_WOA_3851
"what they pay off on""what they pay off on"

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org