attrib. phrase, a. and sb. [f. vbl. phr. stand off: see STAND v. 96.]
A. attrib. phrase and adj.
1. That holds aloof from familiar intercourse; contemptuously distant in manner; reserved, unsocial.
1837. Moore, Mem., 12 Oct., (1856), VII. 203. Lady Lansdowne objected to the number of dirty houses that come up quite close to the Castle [of Windsor]. This Lord John said … he preferred … to the insulation of the great houses of the present day…. [I] was all for the stand-off system of Lady Lansdowne; each rank in its own station.
1859. Lever, Dav. Dunn, xxiv. I want to know what he is personally; is he stiff, haughty, grave, gay, stand-off, or affable?
1888. Mrs. H. Ward, R. Elsmere, i. People generally like the other two much better. Catherine is so stand-off.
1889. Gretton, Memory’s Harkback, 102. Your fellow-passengers are rarely discourteous: but there is almost always the ‘stand-off’ habit with them.
1889. Mrs. Lynn Linton, Thro’ Long Night, II. II. xi. 161. She … was as stiff and stand-off as a grenadier.
1894. Sala, Things I have Seen, I. i. 40. His occasional propensity to treat people in a distant, stand-off, and ‘Great Twamley’ manner.
2. Rugby Football. (See quot. 1910.)
1909. E. Gwyn Nicholls, Mod. Rugby Game, iii. 40. He must be capable of adequately filling the position of stand-off and of scrum half. Ibid., 43. The scrum half’s pass should go to his stand-off colleague.
1910. Encycl. Brit., X. 620/2. One [half-back] stands fairly close to the scrummage and is known as the ‘scrum-half,’ the other takes a position between the latter and the three-quarters, and is termed the stand-off-half.
B. sb. U.S.
1. Aversion to associate with others; aloofness.
1885. D. D. Porter, Incid. Civil War, xiv. 143 (Funk). There was a kind of ‘stand-off’ between the army and the navy when acting together, which prevented them from working in harmony and with one purpose.
2. Something that counterbalances.
1888. Microcosm (N. Y.), Dec., 7/1. We are willing to allow this judicial estimate of the ‘manly attack’ … to count as a stand-off against all the subsidized commendations from wave-theorists.
1890. W. B. Hill, in Atlantic Monthly, Nov., 672/1. When, therefore, the lawyer hears the curses, loud and deep, of his impatient clients, the preferences of other clients … make a complete stand-off; and he feels that the law’s delay is both bad and good.
3. ‘A draw or tie, as in a game; a set-off; as, the contestants agreed to call it a stand-off’ (Funk’s Stand. Dict., 1895.)
4. slang. ‘Extension of time imposed on a creditor; postponement of payment; as, he gave me a stand-off’ (Funk’s Stand. Dict., 1895).
Hence Stand-offish a. = prec. A. 1; Standoffishness, stand-off behavior.
1826. J. Banim, Tales O’Hara F., Ser. II. I. 265. John, too, received from the former a clumsy stand-offish greeting.
1851. Iowa Democratic Enquirer, 28 June, 2/6. A feeling of stand-offishness had existed all along in a certain quarter.
1860. All Year Round, No. 66. 374. We are … not aristocratic, perhaps, but decidedly rich, and on that account rather high and stand-off-ish.
1881. Miss Braddon, Asphodel, II. 172. She has been very stand-offish to me ever since.
1886. P. Robinson, Teetotum Trees, 144. He even becomes a trifle haughty, and affects a stand-offishness which sits grotesquely upon him.
1888. D. C. Murray, Weaker Vessel, xxxii. I told him I did not like this pride and stand-offishness between man and man.
