Origins of "Now, get off my face."

Question

My son picked this phrase up from a TV show {possibly Scrubs} but a simple search of the internet suggests several meanings. We usually have it as "That was friendly {a kiss, cat licking your face, baby's touching your cheeks}, now back away and give me my personal space back {tired of your breath, tired of your fur in my nose, your chocolate covered fingers on my face}." Where did this phrase start? And how long has it been around?

Answer 1

The more typical phrase is:

Get out of my face.

But this is not lighthearted in nature and means, "Stop harassing me."

I was able to find a few uses of "get off my face" but there doesn't seem to be a commonly accepted meaning aside from a literal "You are on my face; get off." This suggests that it has not been around for very long. It is very unlikely that we can know where the phrase started as I'm not sure it really qualifies as a phrase yet.

Comparing usage counts between "get out of my face" and "get off my face" on Google backs this up.

Answer 2

This use of "get off my face" is only used literally, where an animal or person is touching someone's face. There is a scene in the American sitcom Scrubs from episode "My Old Friend's New Friend" [S04E01] where someone is literally touching Dr Kelso's face and in response he says "get off my face". That is presumably the scene to which the question refers.

The usage when something is actually on your face is too obvious to need explained - like "get off the sofa" or "get out of my garden". Get off has many metaphorical senses but this isn't one of them. Get means "to bring or move oneself" (often used with "off", "out", "down", etc), and get out means "leave, escape" (all from Merriam-Webster online).

There are other instances of "get off my face" in fiction, like 1st Book of the Seriously Extraordinary Crazy Adventures of Becca and Company, J. Nolan, iUniverse, 2007, where a literal iguana is literally on someone's face, and that person says "Can you please get off my face now?"

Finding the source of obscure quotes isn't really the function of English Language and Usage Stack Exchange, although there are some similar questions and not all of them get closed. Questions like this probably belong on Movies and TV SE. Nonetheless, this question has not been closed so it was presumably valid at one time, and it is too old to delete or migrate so I have attempted to answer it.

Answer 3

Way late to the party. To get off your face means to get fucked up either by drugs or drink or both. This is slang in the UK/IRE/prob OZ and New Zealand as well