Based upon / "based off" or "based off of" [closed]

As I do not yet have enough "reputation points" to add my thinking to one of the more developed threads on the matter (see, e.g., "Based on" instead of "based off of"), I add them here.

I am a university professor. Each term in recent years, no less than three to five student research papers come to me with the phrase "based off" or "based off of" when "based on" or "based upon" is the proper expression.

If a point has a foundation, it is based upon or based on something.

Likewise, if an idea is rudderless or ill-founded, it does not rest on a proper (or any) foundation -- it is, by definition, off-base, haphazard, ill-conceived, or just plain wrong.

"Based off" or "based off of" sound very much like being "off-base". Literally understood, the former could be read to convey an admission that one's thinking is flawed ("My central point is off-base.").

Put another way, one might write that "It is on this basis that I conclude X", but to write "It is off this basis that I conclude X" is contorted argle-bargle at best.

Last I checked -- quantum physics aside -- "off" and "on" still have opposing meanings. The light cannot be both off and on at once. Nor would it be advisable to build a house "off" a foundation.

For such reasons, to see "based off" or "based off of" in a work is like rubbing steel wool in my eyes, or consigning me to the incessant screech of fingernails across a chalkboard.

Likewise, I am disinclined to give this phrasing a pass as mere "informality". In my view, its use approaches hickish or ignorant.

As it is pure nonsense, "based off" or "based off of" should be banished to parts unknown upon the harshest possible terms.

WR Smith

Solution 1:

Google found this in the book Essentials of Assessment Report Writing By W. Joel Schneider, Elizabeth O. Lichtenberger, Nancy Mather, Nadeen L. Kaufman · 2018

For example, writers born in the 1990s or later generally find the phrase based off to be perfectly natural (e.g., “This technique was based off Vygotsky's notion of scaffolding.”). When readers born before the 1990s see based off in ...

I guess the fact that you don't like "based off" means you are too old.