A genuine one-off

Reader question:

Plain explain “one-off” in this example: Stephen Gerrard is “a genuine one-off”.

My comments:

In other words, Stephen Gerrard, the captain of Liverpool Football Club, is special and unique.

And now that he’s leaving the club for America to, among other things, ease up a bit in the remaining years of a long and remarkable career, soccer fans worldwide – let alone Liverpudians and the Kop faithful – all recognize this: There is only one Stephen Gerrard.

In other words, Stephen Gerrard will never be replaced.

There will never be another Stephen Gerrard.

That’s how special and unique he is. That’s why, I agree, he truly is a “one-off”.

If he were a concept car, then he would be the only model left, for now and for ever. Why? Because they built just one model and throw all the designs away.

One-off, you see, originates from the British foundry industry. A foundry is factory that produces metal castings. Casting means casting metals into different shapes. That’s a process involving first, melting metal into a liquid, then pouring the metal in a mold and, later, removing the mold or casting after the metal has solidified as it cools.

Using the same mold, you can produce any number of widgets of the exact same shape and size by going through the same process.

So if twenty widgets came off the production line, British workers in the 1950s, according to plausible theories online, would call that batch a twenty-off. If 2,000,000 of them came off the line, that batch would be 2,000,000-off.

Consequently, if only one model came off the line, it would be one, off.

Hence the idea of one-off – One model and the whole thing is called off, so to speak.

Back to Stephen Gearrard, who is truly one of a kind, a class act both on and off the field.

His achievements themselves are unique, having played for Liverpool for 17 years. He’s the only Liverpool player to have scored in the finals of the Champions League, Uefa Cut, FA cup and League Cup.

On a painful note, he never won a league title.

I’ve watched over the years many Liverpool greats play, from Kenny Dalglish, Ian Rush, Peter Beardsley, Michael Owen, Robbie Fowler all the way to Luis Suarez. They were all wonderful, but if you ask me who represents Liverpool best, I’d say Stephen Gerrard, who’s always been there, with Liverpool, through thick and thin.

Yes, it seems Gerrard has always been there with its fans, through thick and thin – latterly very thin.

Next year, without Gerrard, Liverpool will be very different.

For fans, among whom is the mom who is seen weeping on camera like a shameless little child upon hearing the news of her idol leaving, LFC will be different without their longest serving captain patrolling midfield and firing long passes forward.

Watching Liverpool will feel different.

But one thing will stay the same. Fans will love Gerrard, in America or anywhere, as before. And they will sing in chorus for him, just as before:

You will never walk alone….

Sentimentalism aside, let’s read a few media examples of the British idiom one-off:

1. FAMOUS actor Richard Briers and his family put on a one-off show in Pill to raise money for a cancer charity.

The TV veteran, who found fame in shows including The Good Life and Ever Decreasing Circles, performed readings and poetry and talked of his showbiz memories at Penny Brohn Cancer Care, Chapel Pill Lane.

His wife Ann Davies and daughter Lucy Briers performed alongside him around the theme of ‘Love and Friendship’.

It is only the second time the family have performed together and the special show drew 80 fans to the charity event and raised more than £2,000 for the cause.

- TV star gives a one-off performance in Pill, TheWestOnMercury.co.uk, April 17, 2008.

2. On Sunday morning, Janet Napolitano twice suggested that the attempted attack in Times Square was a “one-off” event during an interview with ABC News. ABC’s Jake Tapper had asked Napolitano directly about the possibility of international involvement, given the similarities (superficial, at least) between the crude bomb discovered in the Nissan Pathfinder in New York City and those used in attempted bombings in London and Glasgow in 2007. “Well, right now, we have no evidence that it is anything other than a one-off, but we are alerting state, local officials around the country, letting them know what is going on.”

Calling the attempted attack a “one-off” wasn’t directly responsive to Tapper’s question. But it’s clear that Napolitano, who also described the bomb as “amateurish,” wanted to downplay the seriousness of the attack.

She wasn’t alone. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speculated that the attacker could be a mentally deranged person upset with the Obama administration’s health care policy. New York Senator Chuck Schumer said the “odds are quite high this was a lone wolf.”

- Not A “One-Off” Event, WeeklyStandard.com, May 4, 2010.

3. Most people are in the pursuit of happiness. There are economists who think happiness is the best indicator of the health of a society. We know that money can make you happier, though after your basic needs are met, it doesn’t make you that much happier. But one of the biggest questions is how to allocate our money, which is (for most of us) a limited resource.

There’s a very logical assumption that most people make when spending their money: that because a physical object will last longer, it will make us happier for a longer time than a one-off experience like a concert or vacation. According to recent research, it turns out that assumption is completely wrong.

“One of the enemies of happiness is adaptation,” says Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University who has been studying the question of money and happiness for over two decades. “We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them.”

- The Science Of Why You Should Spend Your Money On Experiences, Not Things, PsychologicalScience.org, April 2, 2015.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者张欣 中国日报网英语点津 编辑：王伟）