I have never looked up the etymology of the phrase “out of pocket” meaning “totally unreasonable and ridiculous” but in my pharmacy tech heart and soul I know that it means “like the amount your medication would cost without insurance”
I am not disagreeing with your pharmacy tech heart and soul or indeed what people may generally associate the phrase with here in the present day!
But I was curious about the etymology, and this blog post says:
According to the newest edition of Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, “out of pocket” is a variation on the phrase “out of (the) pocket,” a 1940s African-American expression referring to bad behavior or a bad situation. Cassell’s says this meaning grew out of pool jargon (a shot that was “out of pocket” or “out of the pocket” caused a player to miss a turn).
And Merriam-Webster agrees that this sense comes from African American English and was first recorded in the mid-20th century.
So that was fun to learn, thanks for the prompt to look it up!
And then there’s the newsroom expression — if a reporter is out of pocket, it means they’re somewhere you won’t be able to talk to them for some set period of time. I’d been wondering for ages how reporter jargon somehow morphed into seemingly unrelated Gen Z slang, so I’m happy to see this alternate explanation.
Fascinating and very enlightening to see all these possibilities! I really should have looked all this up earlier, despite my pharmacy tech soul making up its own interpretation. The historical origins are always important to recognize!
One thing about linguistics that I love is how a word or phrase often has more than one contributing origin. Like how “narc” meaning “snitch” is short for “narcotics,” indicating snitching to narcotics officers about drug-related offenses– but its spread may also have been influenced by the fact that it sounds like the Romany term “nak” meaning nose, as in sticking your nose in other people’s business. It’s really neat how people are more inclined to adopt a word if it makes sense to their own folk etymology, regardless of where it came from before they heard it– so everyone’s interpretation of the meaning ends up contributing to its spread.
so maybe part of the reason that the AAVE pool-jargon meaning caught on so well, is because other meanings, or other similar phrases, may have already been in people’s vocabularies, influencing their likelihood of adopting that one. All sorts of streams of human communication, coming together. And definitely important to think about where they come from.