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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
This week it is..... Left in the lurch
Abandoned in a difficult position without help.
This has nothing to do with lurches in the sense of
sudden unsteady movements.
There are suggestions that lurch is a noun that originated
from lich - the Old English word for corpse. Lych-gates
are roofed churchyard entrances that adjoin many old
English churches and are the appointed place for coffins
to be left when waiting for the clergyman to arrive to
conduct a funeral service. To be ‘left in the lych/lurch’
was to be in dire straits indeed.
Another theory goes that jilted brides would be ‘left in
the lych’ when the errant bridegroom failed to appear
for a wedding. Both theories are plausible but there’s no
evidence to support either and, despite the superficial
appeal of those explanations, ‘lych’ and ‘lurch’ aren’t
related.
In fact, the phrase originates from the French board game
of lourche or lurch, which was similar to backgammon
and was last played in the 17th century (the rules having
now been lost). Players suffered a lurch if they were
left in a hopeless position from which they couldn’t win
the game. The card game of cribbage, or crib, also has
a ‘lurch’ position which players may be left in if they
don’t progress half way round the peg board before the
winner finishes.
The figurative usage of the phrase had certainly entered
the language by the 16th century as this line from Nashe’s
Saffron Walden, 1596, shows:
“Whom he also procured to be equally bound with him
for his new cousens apparence to the law, which he
neuer did, but left both of them in the lurtch for him.”
The game came to England from continental Europe and
its name derives from the word ‘left’, which is ‘lurtsch’ in
dialect German and ‘loyrtz’ in Middle Dutch. Why call a
game ‘left’? The most plausible explanation (and regular
readers will know that, in etymology, plausibility isn’t
everything) is that it relates to the bad feeling against
the left hand that was then commonplace in many
cultures. In English we have held on to this with the
word ‘sinister’, which derives from the Latin for ‘left’,
whereas ‘dextrous’ derives from the Latin for ‘right’.
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