Talk:get off to a good start

RFD discussion: November 2021–July 2022
SOP. This would also fail Imetsia's new SOP test as there are also the variants "(get/be) off to a (good/great/bad/...) start". --Fytcha (talk) 18:01, 19 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Move to off to a good start and restructure for that definition. bd2412 T 20:04, 19 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Thinking about this more deeply, I think that "off to a bad start" is a more problematic phrase, since someone who did not know the meaning could assume it was the sense of off as in something being off (basically any of adjective senses 1, 2, 4-7). bd2412 T 23:42, 19 November 2021 (UTC)
 * An additional possibility is that "off to (something)", in this sense, may be a listable idiomatic combination not limited to use with "start". E.g. I can find "off to a flier/flyer", "She was on track to graduate and her team was off to a winning season", "Chad Johnson's boxing debut was off to a surprisingly impressive showing until midway through the fourth round ... ", "Clearly, his career was off to a meteoric beginning.", "Szabo, a right-handed pitcher from Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, was off to a great season in 2020 for the Mountain Lions." Mihia (talk) 02:08, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
 * An entry for off to might suffice. I think part of the conceptual problem with "get off to a [qualifier] start" entries is that getting off to something imports possible meanings of get off, which can itself mean to start (as in get off on the wrong foot). In other words, the phrase could be read as something like "to start towards a [qualifier] start". bd2412 T 02:49, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Uses like “We are off to a promising second year of operations” and “they skated off to a happy future” show that off to a good start is indeed too restrictive. But is the meaning not just a non-literal use of what we see in “I’m off to the war” and “It’s off to work we go”? --Lambiam 18:41, 20 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I see the use of "off to" in "We are off to a promising second year of operations", in the intended meaning, as analogous to "off to a good start", but noticeably distinct from "skated off to a happy future", "off to the war" and "off to work", which are more easily explicable as "off" + "to". The difference may reside mostly in the sense of "to". Whether the former use could reasonably be called a "non-literal" form of the latter seems doubtful to me. Mihia (talk) 01:20, 21 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Semantically, there seems to be a distinction between a state and a direction. One could paraphrase "off to a good start" as "beginning well", while "off to work" is more like "beginning to go toward work". Also, "off to work" seems like away from the current location to somewhere else, with the same connotation as "be off!". I'm not sure in what part of the expression this information resides. Chuck Entz (talk) 02:23, 21 November 2021 (UTC)
 * In "off to work", I see "off" as sense #9, "Started on the way", and "to" as essentially sense #1, "In the direction of". Thus these are separable, e.g. "Time to go to work. I'm off!". In "off to a good start", "off" could still be explained as sense #9, but is the meaning of "to" separable and existing outside this combination? Mihia (talk) 11:59, 21 November 2021 (UTC)


 * Delete given the high number of variations, as mentioned above ("off to a winning season", "off to a lousy start", etc), I think. - -sche (discuss) 05:29, 27 November 2021 (UTC)


 * Delete; I agree with sche's analysis of the thread that the number of variations is just too many. Achieving a medium level of English likely requires knowing multiple senses of "off" including "off to". I doubt many dictionaries have "on the way to a good start", etc. but this requires some knowledge of "way" and "on". If absolutely necessary it could be a phrasebook entry. Facts707 (talk) 05:59, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete per Mihia. - excarnateSojourner (talk | contrib) 00:04, 9 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Deleted. - -sche (discuss) 18:51, 5 July 2022 (UTC)