Like Barb, Liberman was puzzled by this meaning of “out of pocket” and looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. 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. 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 rangeĪfter 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.Ī 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.
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