Everybody else is wrong

I can no longer hold my tongue. This has been driving me crazy for years and I have to speak out. I've held this in because I can find no one who agrees with me. At first I thought I might be wrong. I really tried to adjust how I felt about this but now I find I cannot. It is just wrong and that's all there is to it.

What I am talking about is the phrase "one-off". It is used to mean something that is done or made once. It's like making a prototype of something just to see if it will work. Then, once the point is proven, a better product will be made and multiple copies produced. Or maybe a play would be written, produced and performed for a special occasion never to be performed again.

This article in the New York Times on July 2, 2010 written by Ben Zimmer talks about the origins of the word in Britain and says that its use can be traced back to 1934. Well, that use of the term was just a mistake then and has been propagated incorrectly through the years. After all, these are the same people that misspell "color"! How could you trust them with a phrase like this?

The real phrase is "one-of" as in, "I'm only going to make one of these." You know I'm right. You (and everybody else) just won't admit it. As you know, just because there is no proof that a conspiracy is true doesn't mean that there isn't a conspiracy. The conspiracy, in this case, is to drive me crazy. There are those who would say that it has worked.

[Update]
I was going to write about this again in 2019 but found that I'd already written about it in this post in 2016. I had even considered writing about it in 2014 where I had a draft post with a different web page with the wrong information. Since the New York Times only lets you read a limited number of articles per month, I thought you might like to see another explanation of this phrase. Even if it is wrong.

Here is another view of how "one-off" came to be: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-one4.htm