Home » Black American English » Out of Pocket

Out of Pocket

What does out of pocket mean? The answer splits down racial lines. Among many African-Americans, if someone’s out of pocket, they’re out of line or unruly. For most non-African-American speakers, out of pocket is primarily used in business settings, meaning that someone is either unavailable or out of the office, or they’re paying for something with personal money, with an expectation of being reimbursed later. This is part of a complete episode.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

More from this show

Unparalleled Misalignments

Unparalleled misalignments are pairs of phrases in which the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other, but the phrases themselves mean different things. For example, the phrase blanket statement can be paired with cover story...

Recent posts