Englishoff the wall
Meaning: Unusual; peculiar.
Example: “Her off-the-wall costume ideas always win the contest.”
Origin: American, from the late 1960s, most plausibly drawn from wall-based sports like handball, racquetball, or squash, where a ball's rebound off the wall is genuinely unpredictable — no player can be entirely certain which direction it will bounce back once it leaves the wall. That same unpredictability transferred naturally to describing an idea, comment, or piece of behavior so unconventional that nobody can quite guess where it came from or where it's headed next. No source manages to fully verify the sports connection over any other possible origin, but it remains by far the most commonly cited and most intuitively fitting explanation.
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