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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
