Leave in the Lurch

Maybe your coworker resigned in the middle of a big project, leaving you to pick up the pieces. Or maybe your science fair partner was a slacker, leaving you to finish the entire display. Yup. You got left in the lurch. 

But what is a lurch? And can you leave someone there?

Let’s start at the beginning.

The word lurch comes from a 16th-century French game called lourche. The specifics of the game have been lost, but we think it was a dice game, something like backgammon. In lourche, if you fell far behind the other players, you were said to incur a lurch. 

The term was picked up and used in cribbage, which was born in the same era as lourche. Cribbage is a card game, but players use a wooden board lined with holes to keep track of their scores. As players gain points, they move their pegs around the board, trying to be the first person to reach 61 points.

If one person gets 61 before another player gets 31, guess what? The loser is lurched, and the winner scores two games instead of one. Boom.

This sense of being left behind and badly defeated can be felt in the expression to leave in the lurch. It means to be abandoned in a difficult situation, without support or succor.  

And listeners, that’s just not nice.  

So, there’s your tidbit for today. Be kind to one another. Support your friends, family, and neighbors—instead of leaving them in the lurch.

Samantha Enslen runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com or @DragonflyEdit.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Sources

Ammer, Christine. Leave in the lurch. American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, 2nd ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. 

Cresswell, Julia. The Cat's Pyjamas: The Penguin Book of Clichés. Chapter 4, Sports and Games. Penguin UK, 2007. 

Dent, Susie. Leave in the lurch. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 19th ed. Chambers Harrap, 2012.

Jarvie, Gordon. Bloomsbury Dictionary of Idioms. Leave someone in the lurch. A & C Black Publishers, 2009. 

Oxford English Dictionary, online edition. Oxford University Press. Lurch. Cribbage. (subscription required, accessed August 15, 2016).