World Wide Words: Left in the lurch. QFrom Graham C Reed, South Africa: While reading to my two nieces, we came across the phrase left in the lurch. The older girl questioned this, saying that lurch was what someone did, not a place to be left in. I wondered if there was more to this odd expression. A Your niece could hardly be expected to know that there were two quite different senses of lurch with no connection between them. Both can — or once could be — either a verb or a noun. The sort of lurch that she was thinking of, a sudden uncontrolled movement, comes from a naval expression, variously lee- larch, lee- latch or lee- lurch. To be left or abandoned without assistance in a particularly awkward, difficult, or troublesome situation. Janet was left in a lurch organizing her kid's. Left in the lurch is a crossword puzzle clue. Recent usage in crossword puzzles: New York Times - Jan. 8, 2014 Washington Post - July 4, 2012 Universal Crossword - Nov. 2, 2007 Universal Crossword - Oct. Narang, Jung, Pemba Tamang, Jitu Rai and Raj Chaudhary were seemingly left in the lurch at the Hartsfield- Jackson Atlanta International Airport at the end of their campaign in the ISSF World Cup in Fort Benning, USA. Nicole Lipscomb GS2745 Unit 2 Assign1: Left in the Lurch Persistence: Firm or obstinate continuance in a course of action in spite of difficulty or Read this essay and over 1,500,000 others like it now. Don't miss your chance to earn better grades and be a better. It described a ship that suddenly heeled over or shifted abruptly sideways to leeward. Landsmen borrowed it around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The lurch one may be left in is actually from a sixteenth- century French gambling game. It was played with dice and was supposedly a bit like backgammon, though nobody now knows the details. It was called lourche or l’ourche, which the Oxford English Dictionary suggests may be from a regional German word recorded as lortsch, lurtsch, lorz and lurz. A phrase, lurz werden, meant to fail to achieve some objective in a game. Definition of left in the lurch in the Legal Dictionary - by Free online English dictionary and encyclopedia. What is left in the lurch? Meaning of left in the lurch as a legal term. What does left in the lurch mean in law? Left in the lurch legal definition of left in the lurch. To make an abrupt sudden movement. Home / Today's Paper / Karachi / Haqiqi left in the lurch? By Zia Ur Rehman March 24, 2016 Print : Karachi 0 0 As the latest band of dissidents — now under the The term was taken over into French, not only as the name of the game but also in the phrase demeurer lourche, to lose embarrassingly badly. We’re fairly sure about this last part because lurch was borrowed into English around the end of the sixteenth century to refer to a situation at the end of a game in which one player is beaten by a very large margin, perhaps even a maiden game in which a player scores nothing at all. You said that you had found a reference to cribbage: this was a similar situation, in which a lurch meant that one player had pegged out before the other had reached halfway around the scoring board. This usage of lurch is now rare. To be in the lurch was to be severely discomfited. Various phrases built on the idea, including to give someone the lurch and to have someone at the lurch, respectively to get the better of a man or to have the advantage of him. By the final years of the sixteenth century, within a short time of the word arriving in the language, to be in the lurch had appeared, meaning to be in difficulty and without assistance. After all, it wasn’t the job of the other player to give any help to the loser. The game has long since gone completely out of memory, as have most of the usages of lurch for a bad playing position, but the idiom survives, nearly always as to leave in the lurch. World Wide Words is copyright . All rights reserved. This page URL: http: //www. Last modified: 8 September 2. Left in the lurch - crossword puzzle clue. Left in the lurch is a crossword puzzle clue that we have spotted 8 times. Washington Post - July 4, 2. Universal Crossword - Nov. Universal Crossword - Oct. Wall Street Journal Friday - March 1. New York Times - April 2. New York Times - June 2. New York Times - April 7, 1.
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