I remembered a phrase this morning "Where do you get off…?" (last entry), which is similar to "Who do you think you are…?" or "What gives you the right to…?" or "How dare you…?".
Due to its scarcity in my favorite online dictionaries, I wondered if the phrase was new. But it's been used as early as 1913.
Wanting to know its origin I found this discussion with several good ideas, including "Where do you get off…?" being:
- The same as "Where (on Earth) could you get away with…?"
- About transportation, whether related to ego trip or a physical stop of some importance
- Related to Schadenfreude
But the discussion is informal. Is there formal evidence for what the original implication of "Where do you get off…?" was?
Best Answer
Christine Ammer, American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (1997) confirms that "get off" in the sense you're referring to dates to the early 1900s:
I suspect that it is related to the expression "on one's high horse." Here is Ammer again, on that idiom:
According to Ammer, "get off" [meaning #7] and "get off one's high horse" arose at approximately the same time, raising the possibility that the former is a shortening of the latter.
Unfortunately for this theory, however, Chapman & Kipfer, Dictionary of American Slang, third edition (1995), dates "get off one's high horse" only to "by 1928"—a dog's lifetime after the 1913 occurrence of "where do you get off" that you point out. Here's the relevant entry in Chapman & Kipfer:
On the other hand, that same source states that "get on one's high horse" was current "by 1856," so perhaps people were addressing the question "where do you get off?" to someone who was on his or her high horse, long before they thought to speak of the person afterward as being "off his/her high horse."
UPDATE (8/31/14)
First Occurrences of the Phrase as a Rhetorical Challenge
The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994) finds an occurrence of the phrase in George Ade, "The Fable of the Regular Customer and the Copperlined Entertainer," in More Fables (1900). Here is the full paragraph where that instance occurs:
Ade returns to the expression "The Fable of the Crafty Love-Maker who Needed a Lady Manager," in The Girl Proposition (1902):
Rosemarie Ostler, Let's Talk Turkey: The Stories Behind America's Favorite Expressions has a fairly lengthy but ultimately inconclusive discussion of "tell someone where to get off," as well.
One of the first occurrences of the challenging question "Where do you get off?" occurs in Alfred Lewis, "The Diary of a New York Policeman," in McClure's Magazine (January 1913):
An even earlier instance appears in the lyrics to "Personality" "as sung by Eva Tanguay" in The Philistine (March 1911):
An Alternative Origin Theory
Most people who have discussed the two phrases have supposed that the phrase "tell [someone] where to get off" and the question "where does [someone] get off" have a common origin. But Google Books search results suggest the possibility that while the declarative "tell [someone] where to get off" makes sense in the context of a streetcar conductor, the earliest instances of the question "where does [someone] get off" may have an independent origin.
Specifically, the first match for "where does he get off" occurs eleven years before George Ade's first use of the declarative form, and it arises in a peculiar context: a hearing in the California Senate in about hay prices. I'll quote the example at length because the usage is so clearly idiomatic. From Appendix to the Journals of the Senate and Assembly of the Twenty-Eighth Session of the Legislature of the State of California, volume 8 (1889):
In this excerpt, "where you would get off" seems to mean something like "how you would make [an arrangement] work financially," "how would you get out from under [onerous contract terms]," or simply "how you would benefit [from an arrangement]."The connection to a high horse simply isn't there, and the connection to a railway conductor is remote at best.
This is by no means the only example where "where does one get off" has this distinctive meaning. For instance, from "Prevention of Dealing in Futures," in U.S. Congress, Hearings Before the House Committee on Agriculture, volume 2 (1910), we have this:
And from J.E. Rhodes, "An Appeal to Yellow Pine Lumbermen," in Lumber World Review (May 10, 1915):
And from a letter by M.J. Whittall dated January 27, 1917, to the U.S. House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, reprinted in Hearings Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce of the House of Representatives (1917):
And from Hugh Kennedy, "Delbart: Timber Cruiser," in Saturday Evening Post (1919):
And from P.G. Wodehouse, "Aunt Agatha Makes a Bloomer, in Cosmopolitan (October 1922):
Conclusion
Though usage of "where does one get off?" in the sense of what are one's pecuniary self-interest shows up in Google Books search results 22 years before the same question shows up as (arguably) a rhetorical question about someone's gall or nerve, both meanings coexisted for at least a couple of decades after that, before that rhetorical question eventually won out. It's hard to say whether the rhetorical question arose out of the pecuniary self-interest question, but I wouldn't be shocked if it had. Another possibility is that both meanings arose out of some yet earlier ancestor.
In any event I would love to see a qualified historian of the language look into this hitherto underreported sense of "where does one get off?" from 1889.