During the last Olympics, Jane Edwards from Worcestershire wrote to the Times observing that Mrs Malaprop herself would have found stiff competition from commentators saying: ‘Edging their bets’, ‘Having a conflab’, ‘In one fowl swoop’ and ‘Off his own back’.
The Olympic legacy has certainly included ‘off his own back’. It is curious how often it turns up in sporting contexts, considering it is a mangling of a metaphor from cricket, ‘off his own bat’.
In Trollope’s novel from 1869, He Knew He Was Right, in which a brittle-sounding character is called Glascock (which I suspect is pronounced Glasgow), a lesser hero, Hugh Stanbury, asks an old servant of his rich aunt: ‘Do you know the meaning of making a score off your own bat, Martha?’ Stanbury meant making money by his own efforts instead of inheriting it from his aunt.
I suspect that it was for the sake of rhyme that T.S. Eliot remarked of Mr Mistoffelees, the Conjuring Cat, that ‘All his/ Inventions are off his own bat’. But this well established figure of speech has been widely turned into the meaningless off his own back. Last month the ITV journalist Paul Brand asked Nikki da Costa whether she was scrutinising the assisted dying debate ‘off your own back’. (She was.) When Zia Yusuf quit Reform in June, party sources explained: ‘He’s resigned off his own back.’
The phrase has also become muddled with someone giving you the shirt off his back. The Guardian said of an Iraq veteran: ‘Adam would quite literally give you the shirt off his own back.’ The Sun, reporting that Luke Littler, the darts champion, was cashing in on his success by selling signed match-worn shirts, said that he was ‘peddling the clothing off his own back’. The Sun also found a circumstance where off his own back was neither metaphorical nor erroneous. Dwight Gayle, a Newcastle player, deflected someone else’s shot ‘into the net off his own back’. After a spell of ill luck, his reaction was suitably dorsal: ‘It is a massive weight off my shoulders.’
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