In reply to a telephoned invitation to dinner, I heard my husband ask, in an attempt at a relaxed and modern register of speech, ‘What time’s kick-off?’ His image came from Association Football.
In reply to a telephoned invitation to dinner, I heard my husband ask, in an attempt at a relaxed and modern register of speech, ‘What time’s kick-off?’ His image came from Association Football.
But kick off has recently developed a quite different meaning, exemplified in an online discussion that I stumbled across, about community therapy, where one woman mentioned an incident ‘at about the age of 13, when a lot of my mental health problems really began to kick off and become a real problem’.
The meaning is something like ‘go critical’ (an image from nuclear reaction). Thus the curriculum vitae of a singer at a holiday park says: ‘It wasn’t till the age of 18 when his career really began to kick off.’ Kick off has parallels with kick in. I found an astrologer’s website that says perfectly seriously: ‘It was not until after 1999 that the Higher Self really began to kick in and was then able to lead me and guide me.’ Note how easily the intensifier really accompanies kick off and kick in.
The Oxford English Dictionary does not list kick in under this meaning, but in an entry (for new man) which has been revised more recently it includes a quotation, from the Observer in 2000, which does employ the verb in this sense: ‘Straight men are taking an interest in fashion, which is a sure sign that some New Man thing is about to kick in again.’ Under the word retarders it finds a quotation from 1999 that beautifully illustrates the mechanistic nature of the metaphor: ‘The retarders automatically kick in while the control tower operators align the switches.
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