A quickie...

 ... at least, that's the plan...

A few months ago, a Vodafone ad assailed my ears with the apparently meaningful (but it's up to the listener to put 2 and 2 together) line 'if you're out of contract you could be out of pocket". Hmm...? If you're out of pocket you end up with less money than you should after a deal; you don't pay more than you need to. So the ad produces a mindless jingle that sounds clever with its 'out of.../out of...' wordplay, and leaves the poor punter to do the mental arithmetic: 

<monthly salary> - <monthly payment> ⇒ 'less than I could have';  ∴  'I'm out of pocket'. 

But could isn't the same as should, so the wordplay doesn't really work if you think about it. As so often, the huckster relies on the fact that mostly punters don't think about stuff like this.

<autobiographical-note>
A similar near-miss struck me in the late '70s, when I first heard the album (not yet a stage show) Evita. In the song 'Don't cry for me Argentina' the lines  Dressed up to the nines/At sixes and sevens with you  don't quite work. You are 'at sixes and sevens' with a thing. You might say 'I'm at sixes and sevens with computers' or 'I'm at sixes and sevens with social stuff'; you can't be at sixes and sevens with a person...

<warning reason="neologists at work">
(or maybe you can since Tim Rice had his evil way – who knows what solecisms he held the door open for)
</warning>

But the lyricist wanted a clever-clever bit of wordplay (up to the nines/at sixes and sevens) so coined a new usage.
 </autobiographical-note>

The phrase 'out of contract' was once used almost exclusively, in British English, in sporting contexts. The British Natiional Corpus finds 22 instances of the phrase, and all but a handful are about sports (mostly football and rugby). By contrast the Corpus of Contemporary American English finds only 31, one of which is a misfire (...'walked out of contract talks'). This tally (30 in a billion-word corpus) is relatively much fewer, as COCA is ten times the size of BNC.  And only about a quarter of those deal with sports; the rest deal with screen actors, buildings, cell phones... – a much wider range of contexts than in British English.

So that Vodafone ad was adopting an American usage ...

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To clarify (as  I'm usually annoyed...

<aside>
 (too strong? – well at least having to control a reflex lip-curl)
</aside>

... when people commenting on British English say 'This is an Americanism'. These so-called 'Americanisms' are often features of regional or historic forms of British English ('fall', 'gotten'...); in fact, somewhere (in  an Open University book that I did a Prospero on a few years ago [I didn't throw it in the sea, but I got rid of it]) I read of an eighteenth-century claim in Parliament that people should send their sons to America to learn proper English.

When I say Vodafone borrowed the phrase from America I mean that while the phrase did exist in British English (chiefly in the sporting context) the mobile phone provider (probably in an international company) knew of the American usage in the case of cell phones  and said 'I'll 'ave some of that', not being aware of the phrase's applicabilty in other contexts.
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...and now I find that they're all doing it. On Saturday afternoon, looking for a provider who'd charge less than an arm and a leg for broadband, I saw that Plusnet were using exactly the same line:

Plusnet using the same line

But Vodafone may  not have been the first; they were just the first ones I noticed (and I may have noticed them only because of the ear-bleedingly awful woman who said it [and who has probably the most ubiquitous voice-over presence in the UK😖])

But that's enough; time to do a bit of note-bashing for this:

Update 2024.03.02.21:10 – Added <inline-ps />