Those of us who've been left in the lurch before can tell you that it's not a fun place to be. What we can't tell you is where "the lurch" is located or whether you can leave anything else there.
That brings us to this week's question from our listener Laurel Federbush: "Is “lurch” ever used except for leaving someone in the lurch?"
Before we dig into this, we should note that there is another "lurch" other there, but its root is different than the "lurch" in Federbush's question. This "lurch" refers to "staggering" or "swaying," as in "lurching around." It has nautical roots and shows up in the first half of the 1800s.
The "lurch" we're talking about comes from the French word "lourche." This referred to a game that was played in the 16th and 17th centuries. We don't know much about it, but it sounds like it was similar to backgammon.
Coming from the game, "lurch" came to refer to a devastating win, a state of the score in which one player is way ahead of the other. Cribbage players may still use "lurch" to talk about a game in which the winner scores more than twice as many points as the other player.
In the history of English there are some expressions involving "lurch" that are now obsolete. For instance, you could "give [someone] the lurch," which was to get the better of someone. You could also have someone "[on, in, or at] the lurch," which would mean to have that person at a disadvantage.
The Oxford English Dictionary has evidence of "to leave [someone] in the lurch" going back to 1596. To hear more about this expression and its variant "to leave [someone] in a lurch," listen to the audio above.
