This week's segment is the pits. Stomach pits, that is.
Our listener Sheila King wrote us recently about a pit-related quote she came across while reading Leah Hager Cohen's novel To and Fro: "A moment's exhilaration, as if she'd won the game - followed by a cold pit in her stomach."
King said, "I always thought something happened in 'the pit of your stomach,' as if you felt something very deeply. But lately I keep reading and hearing, all the time, people saying they had 'a pit in their stomach,' as if a peach pit."
References to "the pit of one's stomach" were present in English as early as the 1600s. The phrase is in reference to the upper abdomen, where the stomach and the solar plexus are. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary note that this was often regarded as the seat of sensations associated with fear or unease. It's where we can get feelings in the "pit" of our stomach.
As our listener found though, references to feeling "a pit in one's stomach" are out there.
Here's a 2011 example from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who was writing about the antigovernment protests and uprisings of the Arab Spring: "Watching the Arab uprisings these days leaves me with a smile on my face and a pit in my stomach." Certainly, Friedman was talking about a feeling of unease.
However, this particular usage has been critiqued.
Paul Brians, who wrote Common Errors in English Usage said, "Just as you can love someone from the bottom of your heart, you can also experience a sensation of dread in the pit or bottom of your stomach. I don't know whether people who mangle this common expression into 'pit in my stomach' envision an ulcer or an irritating peach pit they've swallowed ... but they've got it wrong."
Here's what Professor Anne Curzan had to say on the matter: "I would guess that [pit in my stomach] is actually a logical reinterpretation ... where people are thinking about a hole or a hollow in your stomach like a pit of despair, and that's what you're feeling, this empty pit in your stomach."
