3 Meanings of 'Out of Pocket'

In July 2015, a listener named Barb Mindel posted a question on my Facebook page. She wrote, “I have recently heard a couple of my friends from the northeastern states use the term ‘out of pocket’ to refer to the fact that they were unavailable. What is the origin of this idiom?” 

I responded right away, saying that I’d put it on our list of things to cover. 

Well, Barb, it's been a few years, but here, at last, is that episode on "out of pocket"!

‘Out of pocket’ is out of range

After I wrote my short response, a commenter named Lynn Eggers linked to a 2009 post on Language Log, written by Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania.

A mysterious disappearance in the news piqued Liberman's curiosity about why "out of pocket" is used to mean "unreachable." South Carolina governor Mark Sanford was nowhere to be found, not answering his phone or returning his emails. Both his publicist and a state senator described him as “out of pocket.” It later turned out he’d been in South America during his "out-of-pocketry," having an affair with an Argentinian woman. 

Like Barb, Liberman was puzzled by this meaning of “out of pocket” and looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. He found that the OED’s earliest citation was from a 1908 short story by O. Henry called “Buried Treasure”:

Just now she is out of pocket. And I shall find her as soon as I can.

Liberman’s post on “out of pocket” received several dozen comments in the weeks after it was published, and one was from Jan Freeman, who at the time wrote a language column for the “Boston Globe.” Freeman quoted from a piece she’d written in 1997. In this piece, she first nodded to the meaning that is probably more familiar to most of you: “out of pocket” refers to expenses you cover yourself, as opposed to expenses that are paid by someone else, such as your employer or your insurance company. As for the “unreachable” meaning, Freeman had called on Joan Hall, the editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English (“DARE” for short), who identified this idiom as a feature of Southern American English going back to at least 1967.

Of course, 1967 is almost 60 years after 1908, the date of the O. Henry example, but when Freeman wrote her column, that DARE citation was the earliest known written usage of “out of pocket” used to mean "unreachable." The OED, in contrast, didn’t even have an entry for this...

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