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

[Jonathan Lighter]

Here's what JL had in his files, George:

Zilch, nada, nothing.

The expression is new to me.

JL

On Sat, Nov 23, 2024 at 11:14 AM George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu>
wrote:

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


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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