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.
Transcript of “Out of Pocket”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Danette calling from Indianapolis.
Hi, Danette. Welcome to the program.
Hi, Danette.
What can we help you with?
So, okay, a couple of years ago, a co-worker and I were having a conversation, and in it she said that someone was out of pocket.
And I was a little bit confused because the phrase, the way I understood it, didn’t fit with the context of what she was talking about.
So I, you know, I asked her what she meant, and she said that she meant that someone wasn’t available for communication.
And I had always understood it to mean that somebody was acting a bit out of line or disrespectfully.
And the person that I was talking to is Caucasian and I’m black.
So I kind of did a poll of all of my friends of both races.
And it kind of was a straight line that one group meant it to mean one thing and the other group understood it to mean the other thing.
And I didn’t know which meaning came first and where it came from.
Really interesting.
So you did your own fieldwork. I love that.
Yeah, that’s great. That’s great.
That’s something that we try to get our listeners to do all the time.
Yeah, thanks for doing our job for us, Danette.
No, but you found this particular meeting does fall on racial lines.
African-American Vernacular English has a lexicon.
It has proverbs. It’s got vocabulary. It’s got syntax and everything.
It’s got this whole, it’s a dialect of American English that has stuff that belongs only to it, and you found one of them.
So cool. That’s awesome.
As far as we know, Martha, out-of-pocket has three main meanings, right?
The first one is unavailable.
You might say this in a business environment.
Martha’s out-of-pocket.
Can I take a message?
Meaning she’s out-of-touch.
I can’t reach her.
Right.
You might also say in a business sense that if I’m out-of-pocket right now, it means I’m spending my own money instead of the company’s money, and I’ll probably save my receipts and get reimbursed later.
But then, in the African-American vernacular context,
In more informal, almost slang register,
Even within that dialect of English, out-of-pocket means…
It means unruly, disrespectful, out-of-line,
Exactly the way you described it, Dan Head.
Very good.
Is this widespread across the United States?
I think it is. Yeah.
I do see it here in the Berkeley Dictionary,
Which was published in 1994,
So we know it popped up in California, right?
I’ve heard it in some hip-hop music.
Well, the most recent song that I can think of is Jennifer Hudson had a song on her album where she was threatening to hit someone with her pocketbook in which she said, you’re acting out of pocket, don’t make me hit you with my pocketbook.
Oh, really?
Nice play on words. Beautiful.
That’s great.
But that’s the meaning of it.
That’s great.
They’re acting unusual or crazy or in a way that’s completely unacceptable.
Somehow it just means you’re not acting right.
Yeah, and I think that this meaning arose later than the earlier meaning of being unavailable.
I see here in Tom Dalzell’s dictionary, he’s a slang lexicographer, that he’s found a use of it as far back as 1972.
This particular meaning of out-of-pocket, meaning he calls it out-of-line or inappropriate.
So that’s interesting.
So it’s got about 30 years, I’m sorry, 40 years of history or so.
Yeah.
So it’s nothing brand new.
That’s cool.
In fact, I really don’t hear the slang version of it used that often.
No.
I remember hearing it a lot when I was younger and not as much.
Oh, so this is something that your peer group knew and that you learned from probably your friends.
Exactly.
And did you grow up in Indianapolis or somewhere else in the country?
No, I’m originally from Gary, Indiana.
Okay.
Okay, interesting.
So we’ve got a little bit of data here that you’ve gathered that shows us that this is primarily African-American as far as you know.
And I think the data that we found in online resources confirms that.
That’s cool.
Cool.
All right.
So I hope we’ve helped you some, Danette.
It did help me.
It cleared it up.
It confirmed my research, my informal research.
Exactly.
Thanks for calling, Danette.
We really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
