What's the difference? Can I say "my birthday is far off" and/or "my birthday is way off"? thanks.
1 Answer
The standard idiomatic usage metaphorically conflating distant in future time with spatially remote is...
My birthday is a long way off
We don't actually say X is far off very often at all for temporally or spatially distant things (but far away is common). And we mostly use X is way off in the highly metaphoric sense of a long way from what it should be (as in a completely wrong answer, something very badly adjusted, etc.).
Google Ngrams has a 5-word limit on search strings, so I can't directly compare 1: Christmas is far off, 2: Christmas is way off, 3: Christmas is a long way off because that last sequence is 6 words. But here's a chart showing no hits at all for the first two, where I removed that final word off from the last one (which has lots of matches; people are always impatient for Xmas!). And I bet every match that it did find will actually include that 6th word anyway.
answered Oct 29, 2020 at 12:28
