All your base are off of us

May 16, 2006 6:21 PM

Did "based on" beget "based off of"?

My girlfriend, the grammar-teacher-to-be, is in the process of grading papers and is going batty with the persistent usage of the phrase "based off of" in place of "based on". Googlefight gives us 1,490,000,000 "based on" to 1,750,000 "based off of", indicating a clear usage bias. I cannot find a dictionary (web or paper) that includes "based off of" at all. (Sadly, we have no OED.) Does anyone know where this came from? Are we seeing a phrase from a foreign language seep in via literal translation? Pop culture? Dialect?

In searching, I have found a large number of sites which, to my surprise, use both phrases. Is there a different connotation of which I'm not aware?

posted by Mr Stickfigure to writing & language (28 comments total)

The relevant OED2 entry is in the second sense of the second entry for the verb "base":

2. To place on or upon a foundation or logical basis; to found, establish securely, secure. (So mod.F. baser.)

with three citations dating to only 1841 and no citations of "based off of". My own wildass guess? Those saying "based off of" see "based on" as an arbitrary idiom rather than an analogy to a physical foundation and don't exercise care in choosing an appropriate preposition for the analogy.

As for "off of" specifically instead of "off", it's no different than the usage many have complained about in eg. "bounced off of". Once you get to "based off an X" instead of "based on an X", throwing the "of" in will be second nature to the people those sites complain about. (I'm not taking sides.)

Maaaaybe some influence from "basis of" but I doubt it.
posted by mendel at 6:39 PM on May 16, 2006

I've asked this question of American English speakers before, and all (er, possibly both) have said that 'off of' and 'on' in this context are equivalent. Speaking as an English English speaker, the phrase is never used here. It's also one of those Americanisms that looks very strange indeed, like 'could care less' for 'couldn't care less', though at least 'off of' makes sense.

Oh, hang on - if you're using words like 'batty' and talking of the OED, does that mean you're in the UK? If so, yes, 'based off of' is indeed from the foreign language of American English, and I'm obviously lagging behind on our adoption of Americanese.
posted by jack_mo at 6:50 PM on May 16, 2006

I use the word 'batty' and have an OED. Does that mean I'm in the UK? Cor blimey.
posted by TonyRobots at 7:12 PM on May 16, 2006

No, there isn't a different connotation, it's just incorrect English.
posted by Dasein at 7:38 PM on May 16, 2006

Does that mean I'm in the UK?

Not judging by the number of users nearest you! Apologies for assuming 'batty' was un-American. Unless you mean it in the Jamaican sense, in which case, I'm confused.
posted by jack_mo at 7:53 PM on May 16, 2006

What drives me batty is the use of "off of". "Off" is sufficient. For example, "Jack jumped off the pier", as opposed to "Jack jumped off of the pier".
posted by acoutu at 7:56 PM on May 16, 2006

Daein is correct. "Based off of" makes no sense and is incorrect.
posted by trip and a half at 8:42 PM on May 16, 2006

Er, 'Dasein' is correct.
posted by trip and a half at 8:43 PM on May 16, 2006

It's just commonplace sloppy grammar. [sigh] Add it to the list.
posted by desuetude at 8:50 PM on May 16, 2006

Heh. I managed to botch both punctuation and spelling while correcting grammar! I think I'll go to bed now.
posted by trip and a half at 8:54 PM on May 16, 2006

I say both "on" and "off of", and as an American English speaker consider both perfectly normal, neither slang nor sloppy (nor the result of a foreign tongue).

I don't see why it would be considered in any way wrong, considering there are plenty of prepositions that are idiomatic to begin with; being based "on" or "off of" are metaphorical anyway. Certainly I don't think the French are wrong for using the preposition "in" for things like a home: when I correct a French friend telling me in English "Welcome in my home" or reply that one says "I live on 15th Street", I don't think the French forms are incorrect. And I've heard British tell about something they saw "in the High Street". How "based off of" makes any less sense than living on 15th Street while cars drive down or on the street but a dog was running in the street... well...

At the very worst, I'd consider it a generalised variant, lacking any data to see if it's in any a regionalism.
posted by baklavabaklava at 9:15 PM on May 16, 2006

...don't exercise care in choosing an appropriate preposition

As someone who can use "based on" and "based off of" interchangeably, I can guarantee that there is no element of 'choice' involved. Both are fully grammatical and natural options, and I would not think about the selection of preposition when speaking or hearing them, any more than you would 'choose' to use a "by" PP in a passive (e.g. "the book was written by John").

I don't think there is any difference in meaning between the two, or if there is, it is very subtle.
posted by advil at 9:22 PM on May 16, 2006

"Based off of" is not preferred usage for most editors, no matter how familiar it may sound.
posted by Miko at 10:56 PM on May 16, 2006

"Based off of" is not preferred usage for most editors, no matter how familiar it may sound.

nonono -- the structure of the argument went like this. People said things ranging from moderate to complete nonsense, because they hold (possibly unexamined) prescriptivist viewpoints about language. Then baklavabaklava and I responded and said that from a descriptivist point of view, the things they were saying were nonsense (actually, we were both more subtle than this; what we each pointed out is that there seem to be moderately large dialects where this thing is a part of the language, and furthermore arbitrary(/apparently nonsensical) preposition choice is quite common. I urge you to look at baklavabaklava's nice examples of this and think hard about them.). It doesn't work to reply to this by saying something that amounts to "I am a prescriptivist, and so are most editors".
posted by advil at 12:55 AM on May 17, 2006

English English speaker here - the question of whether this is preferred usage has never arisen in my mind (and I do some editing) as I had never heard this phrase before seeing this question.
posted by altolinguistic at 1:38 AM on May 17, 2006

I've never heard the phrase "based off of" before, but the insertion of "of" seems to be an American thing (see also: "not that big of a deal", rather than "not that big a deal", which jars to my British ear).

That said, there's an increasingly common – it crops up on radio all the time, particularly from the mouth of Radio 1's Scott Mills – use of "off of" to mean "from"*. For example, Mills will identify a caller as "Gemma off of Bristol", which just seems, well, wrong.


*I mean this with respect to geographic location, and not with the (around for donkeys) usage when referring to someone "off of" the telly, which sounds normal to me.
posted by Len at 5:05 AM on May 17, 2006

Oh, and in answer to advil's request to have a look at baklavabaklava's examples:

And I've heard British tell about something they saw "in the High Street". How "based off of" makes any less sense than living on 15th Street while cars drive down or on the street but a dog was running in the street... well...

"[I]n the High Street" is a little more coded than it first looks; here, the "High Street" isn't just the name of a given street, which may or may not in fact be called "High Street", but also refers to a set of shops which crop up in most British towns and cities' centres, from clothes and book shops through to electrical goods shops, chemists, newsagents and so on. (To give a quick example of use: you quite often see/hear adverts for shops which will offer "designer quality at high street prices!", most often when talking about clothes.) So "in the high street" really means "in the high street shops". (Though I've just realised, is this usage common in America too? I'd never really thought about it; if it is, apologies for the long-winded exegesis.)

You "live on 15th street" (though not in the UK, I'd have thought, since we don't tend to do numbers for street names), in the sense that the entrance to your house is located on 15th street, I'd have thought – I'd assumed that American usage on this is the same – rather than (in the case of a homeless person) on, or in (the middle of) the street/road which cars drive down/up (both directional) or on (literally, in that their wheels are touching the tarmac).

A dog "running down (or along) the street" any British person would assume was on the pavement; the use of "running in the street" shifts their location to where the traffic is, and thus notes the possibility that it might get run over by one of the cars going up/down the street.

If that makes sense. (I hope it does.)
posted by Len at 5:39 AM on May 17, 2006

It doesn't work to reply to this by saying something that amounts to "I am a prescriptivist, and so are most editors".

Why not? Isn't that true? It seems like a reasonable thing to say.

Basically this seems like another one of those things where some will argue that "based on" makes logical sense as a construction whereas "based off of" does not (based on implies that something is the basis for something else; based off of seems to imply that the basis lies somewhere other than the thing in question, but that's not the intended meaning). Then someone will point out all the other idiomatic expressions which don't make logical sense and emphasize the uselessness of looking for logical consistency in such things. Then someone else will say that since "based on" originally made logical sense, changing it to something else which seems to mean the opposite is an undesirable outcome.

Anyway, I hear people say this all the time (Americans - I can't say I've noticed whether or not Brits say it). I don't think they give it any more thought than they do to any number of other common English expressions. Personally I think that "based off of" sounds less elegant than "based on," but I'm sure I've used both at times. I doubt I'd be upset if an editor corrected my usage of "based off of," though.
posted by ludwig_van at 5:43 AM on May 17, 2006

(Though I've just realised, is this usage common in America too? I'd never really thought about it; if it is, apologies for the long-winded exegesis.)

No, it's not, as far as I know; I started to figure it out after arriving in London when I started seeing signs exactly as you describe: "Designer fashions at high street prices!"
posted by ludwig_van at 5:48 AM on May 17, 2006

Dasein is correct. "Based off of" makes no sense and is incorrect.

No, Dasein is wrong, and so are you. Prepositions aren't supposed to "make sense," they're supposed to connect other words. Based on and based off of are equally "correct" for those who use them both. The fact that you may not be familiar with the usage does not mean "it's just incorrect English." The English language is not coextensive with your personal dialect. Also, it is not coextensive with what editors enforce on published documents.

As so often, a tip of the hat to advil for injecting good sense into the madhouse of MeFi grammar discussion.
posted by languagehat at 6:42 AM on May 17, 2006

As someone who can use "based on" and "based off of" interchangeably, I can guarantee that there is no element of 'choice' involved. Both are fully grammatical and natural options, and I would not think about the selection of preposition when speaking or hearing them, any more than you would 'choose' to use a "by" PP in a passive (e.g. "the book was written by John").

Of course there's choice involved. You choose to use both expressions interchangeably. Maybe you don't think a lot about how you choose words, but language does not spring straight from impulse to vocalization. (A good example would be that most people wouldn't, for example, cuss in front of their parents. But that doesn't mean that we have to think consciously, "don't say fuck, don't say fuck, don't say fuck" every time Mom calls.)
posted by desuetude at 6:43 AM on May 17, 2006

Prepositions aren't supposed to "make sense," they're supposed to connect other words.

That seems somewhat inaccurate, LH. If there's an ant crawling on my arm, saying "There's an ant in my arm" doesn't really make sense, does it? "On" and "in" in this case represent two significantly different relationships between the ant and my arm.

This is just like the whole "could care less" versus "couldn't care less" thing. "On" and "off" are generally thought of as antonyms, but in this case they're being treated like synonyms. I can understand the descriptivist argument and the idea that "Idiomatic expressions aren't always logical, that's just how language works," but saying that prepositions aren't supposed to make sense doesn't seem like a good argument for the validity of this particular expression.
posted by ludwig_van at 6:58 AM on May 17, 2006

Well, obviously it's more complicated than my brief remark suggests, but let me put it this way: prepositions originally indicated spatial relations, so that on meant 'on top of' (physically), in meant 'inside,' and so on. But we humans have an irrepressible urge to use language metaphorically and allusively, and just as we use nouns in extended senses (sense, for example, is from a Latin word meaning 'what you [physically] feel'), we use prepositions for things well beyond the physical. Now, once you get past the physical, you no longer have the obvious cues (this book is on the table, that one is in the box—it would clearly be wrong to exchange the prepositions), and the choice of prepositions becomes a matter of whatever metaphor was in the mind of whoever first used the extended sense. Why do we say "it's been on my mind" rather than "in my mind"? Who knows? But that's what we say, and it's right because that's how we say it, not because of any inherent property of the preposition.

Of course, people are not content with "that's just the way it is," so they make up stories about why their usage is correct. (See this LH post for a hilarious story about "giving up the goat.") But really, for much of language, "that's just the way it is" is the only real answer. You can get into the history of it, but that's a different ball game.
posted by languagehat at 7:31 AM on May 17, 2006

Well, obviously it's more complicated than my brief remark suggests, but let me put it this way: prepositions originally indicated spatial relations, so that on meant 'on top of' (physically), in meant 'inside,' and so on. But we humans have an irrepressible urge to use language metaphorically and allusively

But wouldn't you agree that "based on," though somewhat metaphorical because it doesn't literally indicate a physical relationship, is a rather transparent and logical usage? It conjures the image of thing X standing on top of thing Y; Y serves as the base for X, which is exactly the meaning intended.

"Based off of," on the other hand, seems to indicate the opposite. It literally sounds as though X is based somewhere outside of Y, which is not the meaning intended. Basically I agree with mendel.

It seems to me that clarity and consistency in language, where possible, is a worthy goal. That's not to say that I'd try to mandate that everyone stop saying "based off of," or that I'd tell them they were necessarily incorrect for saying it, but I will do my part as a user of English to promote clarity and consistency by favoring "based on" (and "couldn't care less," &c) in my own usage.
posted by ludwig_van at 7:56 AM on May 17, 2006

As someone who can use "based on" and "based off of" interchangeably, I can guarantee that there is no element of 'choice' involved.

For the record, all I meant by "not exercising care in their choice of preposition" is that they're not choosing a preposition by considering only the physical analogy, not that they're being somehow derelict in doing so.
posted by mendel at 9:12 AM on May 17, 2006

Also, it is not coextensive with what editors enforce on off of published documents.

Why do we say "it's been on off of my mind" rather than "in my mind"?

OK?
posted by Kirth Gerson at 10:21 AM on May 17, 2006

There are other examples of English piling on prepositions (postpositions? whatever), so I have to wonder if it's in the nature of the culture. Or the language. Or whatever.

For example, time was you "beat" a man.

Later you "beat up" a man.

Now you "beat up on" a man.

Were will the madness end???
posted by IndigoJones at 6:28 PM on May 17, 2006

Same idea, different phrase-- "on accident" (versus by accident). I hear that one a lot-- drives me nuts. Sorry, just had to vent.
posted by orangemiles at 8:00 AM on May 18, 2006