"Based off"

Where did this horrible expression come from? I had never noticed it before, but a good half of the undergraduate papers my wife was recently grading included either "based off" or "based off of". Looking online I found this Boston Globe article from last month, which notes that while the earliest Nexis reference dates back to 1979, the surge in usage has taken place in just the past few years. Googling "based on" still produces far more hits than "based off", but the latter still is good for over four million citations at last count. I wasn't able to find all that much more on the expression, aside from this Metafilter thread which predictably sees commentors line up behind prescriptivist or descriptivist banners. Seems rather pointless, that: for the self-proclaimed descriptivists, it seems to be all or nothing -- either you embrace every linguistic mutation, or you must be an intolerant, reactionary, tide-commanding prescriptivist. I say forget the labels, embrace felicitous neologisms, and hold the line against outright mistakes -- "based off" emphatically included.

Posted by David on March 3, 2008 9:58 PM