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In my English book, I've got an article about traveling, and one sentence in particular caught my eye:

I've always put these incidents down to experience, and dined off some of them for years.

What does dined off mean in this context (because I've only found meanings related to eating, and that doesn't quite suit this sentence)?

jwodder
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Lesmian
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3 Answers3

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It's a slightly quirky idiomatic usage that even many native speakers might not be familiar with.

What the writer means is that these "incidents" form the basis of interesting tales that can be recounted repeatedly in after-dinner conversations by a skilled raconteur (by implication, such as himself).

Because people like to be entertained in this way after a (formal) dinner, the host / organisers of the event would be likely to invite the writer. And there's usually the implication that any such "after-dinner speaker" would be likely to actually be paid to turn up (in addition to getting a free luxury meal, whereas the other diners are probably paying for the privilege of being there).

Sometimes there's no suggestion of payment / free food. I dined out on that story for years might simply mean When I went out for a meal with friends, I often used to tell that amusing anecdote, even if the speaker always scrupulously paid at least his fair share of the bill. He might just mean that his ability to entertain fellow-diners ensured such evenings were a success, and/or that people invited him out to dinner for this very reason.

Note that this idiomatic usage often includes other prepositions...

He dined off that for years
He dined out off that for years
He dined out off of that for years
He dined out on that for years
He dined out with that for years

All those (and probably more) seem fine to me, but others may feel different.

FumbleFingers
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  • thx for your answer. I was thinking about that scenario and wanted a confirmation from someone who is sure :) Could you tell me than, is there any difference in meaning between dine out and dine off? – Lesmian Sep 05 '17 at 17:42
  • It sounds like what the author is attempting to convey is "I Encountered some negative event. I internalized the lesson I learned from that negative event. I would then use what I learned from that negative event in the future so I would not make a similar mistake again, sometimes for years." The last sentence is what corresponds to the "dined off some of them for years" phrase. I doubt it had anything to do with actually eating out or recounting the event over dinner, as "dined off" means consumed. – RIanGillis Sep 05 '17 at 18:55
  • There is a similar idiom of "your money is no good here"/"he can't buy a drink". Unlike "dining out on", this is matter of a person being so well-regarded that others insist on paying his bar-tab, even without hearing the tale that led to his acclaim. – Michael Lorton Sep 05 '17 at 21:00
  • I think it would be very helpful to have more of the original context of the quote. "Dined off some of them" appears to be a metaphor, with the literal meaning of "dining" being twisted into some other context - what that context is can only be speculation without the source. Did he eat free by telling tales? Were these "incidents" huge windfalls in the stock market that literally paid for his food? I don't think either, but I am not clear exactly what the case is. – Darren Ringer Sep 06 '17 at 01:10
  • @RIanGillis: The so I would not make a similar mistake again aspect is implicitly covered by put these incidents down to experience (the writer has turned his superficially "negative" incidents into positives, because he's *learned* from them, so he won't make the same mistakes again). But the bit about "dining off them" would normally be intended more or less *literally. He really did* recount them as anecdotes over dinner, though probably not as a paid speaker. As an idiom, it's more about turning "bad memories" into "interesting tales", rather than money/free food. – FumbleFingers Sep 06 '17 at 14:26
  • @Darren Ringer: Here's the full context of OP's cite. If you don't know the expression you could get a feel for how it's used by looking at written instances of dined off that story. But you can pretty much forget about the financial side of things - it's nearly always just about having *entertaining stories* (that make people want to listen to you telling them). – FumbleFingers Sep 06 '17 at 15:01
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    I don't think it's really implied that he was paid directly; it seems more like people would take him out to dinner to hear his story. – Casey Sep 06 '17 at 16:04
  • @FumbleFingers I appreciate the link. That does make it clear that the discussion is about stories recounting personal experiences as mentioned. I think the OP's question could be made more clear by indicating that this sentence is used in reference to one such story immediately preceding it. I was familiar with "dined off that story" but could not tell from the original post that this was unambiguously about stories. The disputed sentence seems to recast it as "dined off that incident" (from which the same meaning may certainly be inferred), but it's much clearer in the original context. – Darren Ringer Sep 06 '17 at 16:35
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    @Darren Ringer: The idiomatic usage can occur in various forms. I'll edit to reflect that. – FumbleFingers Sep 06 '17 at 17:13
  • He dined out off of that for years? o_O Is that correct? I mean, doesn't is look strange? – Lesmian Sep 06 '17 at 17:25
  • @Lesmian: I did say others may feel different! But if I may assume you're a non-native speaker yourself (your profile doesn't say), I should point out that it's essentially an informal (if slightly dated) usage, so it's more a matter of what it sounds like, not what it looks like when actually written down. In practice, *of* would normally be reduced to a (sometimes, barely audible) *schwa. Also note that Anglophones don't mind strings of multiple prepositions, so three (or even more) in a row can be perfectly natural ; Come in out of the rain!* (or even Come up* in...)* – FumbleFingers Sep 06 '17 at 18:03
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    I didn't want to offend you in any way, it just looks strange to me, that's all :) But with you examples and explanation it makes sense. And you are right, I'm not a native so my opinion doesn't really matter :) – Lesmian Sep 06 '17 at 20:56
  • @Lesmian:Well, we are on English Language Learners*, so arguably your opinion is more important than mine here! But my point was simply that as a learner, you're more likely to notice all the individual elements in a string of prepositions, where native speakers would more easily parse them in groups* that fit together in certain ways. Also, you're more likely to be struggling with written forms which we transparently convert into "inner voice speech" in our minds (besides which we hear spoken English more anyway). This I think makes a difference. – FumbleFingers Sep 07 '17 at 12:51
  • He dined out off that for years.?? and: He dined out off of that for years. are definitely not something I have ever seen. – Lambie Jan 25 '22 at 14:28
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    @Lambie: Like I said, others may feel different. I won't bother editing links in to my existing answer text, but I'd be prepared to bet I could successfully google all the variants I listed above - and probably more, if I could think of some credible alternative prepositions or combinations to search for in this context. – FumbleFingers Jan 25 '22 at 16:36
  • @FumbleFingers It's ridiculous frankly. He dined out off that is silly and ungrammatical. And by the way, you can find just about anything on the internet by googling. All sorts of agrammatical and non-grammatical shite (Irish term). Is that how we are justifying things now?? Really? – Lambie Jan 25 '22 at 16:44
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    I don't understand the point of your comments. Unquestionably, all the forms I listed *do* occur, my answer already acknowledges that not everyone will be familiatr with all variants, *and* there's already a comment from someone else saying that at least some permutations look "strange". It doesn't really add anything for *you* to say you aren't familiar with some of them, and it's totally irrelevant to start questioning the "syntactic validity" of any of the forms. If they're used, they're used. And they *are*. – FumbleFingers Jan 25 '22 at 16:50
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The more usual version in English is "dine out on". That is, the experience, or whatever, is so fascinating that people will invite you to dinner just to hear about it.

(They don't necessarily invite you to a restaurant. You could equally well be invited to someone's house, but from your own point of view you are not at home and you are therefore dining out.)

"Dine off" means essentially the same but is less English. It may be American.

Martin Kochanski
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  • In the US, I've always heard "dine out on" rather than "dine off." – ArrowCase Sep 06 '17 at 16:44
  • This version even has a reference: http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/dine+out+on+(something) – David K Sep 06 '17 at 18:17
  • I have never seen either but accept both, as it fits with the "genius" of the language. Normally, dine out is not followed by on. It's just to dine out as opposed to having dinner (dining) at home. – Lambie Sep 07 '17 at 18:51
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PART ONE: In English, writers seek to be creative and avoid clichés. So here the writer used the **well-known phrasal verb to live off and changed it **to dine off of****.

to live off of something [food, people, land] means to consume or use that thing in order to live or to survive.

  • He lives off cans of beans. I don't know how he does it. [only eats beans for food to survive]
  • They have lived off the land for three generations. [used the land as a means of existence]
  • She lives off her mother because she cannot get any work. [uses her mother's monetary help to live].

PART TWO: The writer is using the idea of incidents as a means of survival. He lives [dines] off these incidents either means he is a paid journalist and these incidents provide him a subject to write about or it means that the writer "survives" in his imagination by "consuming" these incidents. As mentioned by FumbleFingers, he could be telling stories. In this day and age, media is considered to be consumption. Most people hear about incidents through the media. And dining is a kind of eating. But NOT for survival. If you are dining, you are doing more than surviving. You are probably pretty well off.

PART THREE: He has transformed the idiom to live off [something] into: to dine off something. The use of the verb dine is either sarcastic or funny. Dining is connoted in English as a formal activity. "Where did you dine last night?" it is slightly old-fashioned and would be considered somewhat snobby. Dining is also the place for conversation.

Conclusion: So these incidents provide content for him. If you dine on something, you eat it. If you dine off of something, you are using the thing to your advantage in some way that goes beyond survival and involves a formal activity (dining) which you enjoy.

Lambie
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    I think you're stretching the idiomatic usage too far here. A journalist / columnist wouldn't be likely to say he *dined off* the stories he wrote unless he used them as material in after-dinner conversations (or if he "moonlighted" in the more formal role of professional after-dinner speaker). That's to say *to dine off [some anecdote]* isn't really just a whimsical alternative to to live* off [some source of revenue / sustenance]*. It's more about keeping people entertained (and hence being a welcome guest), rather than financial or nutritional reward. – FumbleFingers Sep 05 '17 at 16:59
  • @Lambie I really appreciate your answer, however FumbleFingers's answer make more sense to me :) – Lesmian Sep 05 '17 at 17:44
  • +1 for this interpretation. Say you have a collection of tales, or of old sayings, or tips for others. When you use these in practice, this can be thought of as "feeding off of them", as in "using them as input for a process" (in this case, storytelling or giving advice), and once you invoke the idea of "feeding", you have all the other idioms and metaphors that can and do come into play, such as "dine off of them/these" – SlimsGhost Sep 05 '17 at 18:19
  • The writer doesn't change it to "dine off of" - they change it to "dine off" (if indeed this interpretation is correct). – psmears Sep 06 '17 at 15:05
  • Phrases such as "dine off of" or "dine out on" are well-known phrases with a conventional meaning that has been reasonably well captured in other answers. This answer, in contrast, seems to be a clever but misleading invention. – David K Sep 06 '17 at 18:22
  • @David K Dine out on and off of are not well-known phrases at all. A voracious reader myself, this is my first encounter with dine off of. – Lambie Sep 06 '17 at 21:53
  • @psmears Read again: "dined off some of them for years". Anyway, that's not the main point. – Lambie Sep 06 '17 at 21:55
  • @FumbleFingers It is my contention that dine off is parallel to live off. And without it, would make no sense. Without live off, dine off would make no sense. – Lambie Sep 06 '17 at 21:56
  • @SlimsGhost Yes, live off and feed off, same idea. :) – Lambie Sep 06 '17 at 21:58
  • @Lambie Sure, the exact three-word phrase "dine off of" doesn't seem common and in fact did not occur in the question. Whether you were aware of it or not, I am reasonably sure I've seen the idiom with the word "dined" before, and the variant "dine out on" is well-known enough to appear in an on-line dictionary: http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/dine+out+on+(something) – David K Sep 07 '17 at 01:59
  • @LambieL I've read it lots of times. And it's still "dined off some of them...", not "dined off of some of them..." as it would be if the author were using "dined off of". – psmears Sep 07 '17 at 05:40
  • @Lambie: It's true that *to dine off [a story]* is much the same construction as *to live off [the land], but that needn't imply the former couldn't exist without the latter. Consider, for example, [I talk in a way I learned off the radio](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=%22learned+off+the+radio%22). They're all just "compound verbs" where the off* (or indeed the apparently opposite alternative *on*) component simply clarifies the relationship between the primary nouns in a statement. – FumbleFingers Sep 07 '17 at 13:14
  • @psmears Whether one puts in an of or not changes nothing. – Lambie Sep 07 '17 at 18:49
  • @FumbleFingers Your thing about after-dinner is simply your interpretation. There is no hint of "after-dinner" conversation in the idea at all. – Lambie Sep 07 '17 at 18:52
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    @Lambie: That's not true. In (most varieties of) educated British English, "off of" is considered wrong, or at least nonstandard, and if you use it you may be considered to have poor English - not great for readers of ELL! (Note the original source of the quote was a British newspaper article). And no, it's more than FumbleFingers' interpretation: it's (a variation on) a very well known idiom. – psmears Sep 07 '17 at 19:44
  • @psmears Here is an educated speaker (UK) discussing living off of the land. So please. http://sensiblesurvival.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/bug-and-snakes-if-youre-really-hungry.html – Lambie Sep 07 '17 at 20:57
  • "If you are *living off of the land*, however, you must put aside your food prejudices and take advantage of whatever is available that will keep you alive." My hands are perfectly clean, said Emily. – Lambie Sep 07 '17 at 20:58
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    That blog may have a ".co.uk" URL, but it is most definitely written by a speaker of US English. Note how they refer to a "skillet" (BrE: "frying pan" - nobody says "skillet" in the UK); how they spell color (BrE "colour"); they refer to rubbing alcohol (BrE "surgical spirit")--and prices in dollars from a US chain (Harbor Freight) which doesn't exist in the UK. – psmears Sep 08 '17 at 06:56
  • Yes, OK. But I still think this is a tempest in a teapot. – Lambie Sep 09 '17 at 12:37