A restaurant manager in Kokomo, Indiana, had an employee who failed to show up for work. This left him wondering about the phrase left in the lurch. It probably derives from an old game similar to backgammon called lourche, the object of which is to one’s opponent behind on the board, or in other words, to leave them in the lurch. In Old French, lourche means “deceived,” “embarrassed,” “trapped,” or “duped,” and also came to mean “a place where hunters lie in wait.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Left in the Lurch”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, Martha. Hi, Grant. How are you two today?
My name is Danny. I’m calling from Kokomo, Indiana, about an hour north of Indianapolis.
And I was calling in with the question. I work in the catering and restaurant business. I’m a service manager for a local restaurant catering company.
And as you well know, when you work in restaurants, sometimes there can be a lot of turnover and a lot of staffing issues, which seems to be rampant nowadays everywhere in the service industry.
And a couple months ago, I had a longtime employee not show up for their shift. And I was sending an email to my fellow team members and said I was really surprised they left us in the lurch like that.
And that’s a term I’ve used my whole life, used often in my family. When someone doesn’t show up or goes back on a promise, they’ve left you in the lurch.
Then I got to thinking, where is the lurch? Where is the lurch? The only lurch I’ve ever really known was from the Adams family, you know, the butler.
So I thought you guys might be able to answer that for me. What is the lurch and where is it and how do I get out of it?
Exactly.
Well, it’s nothing to do with ships or drunks or falling down. And the lurch, as in like walking oddly or lurching from side to side, is a different word.
And we’re not going to talk about that one today. But we will talk about in the lurch. And this is when someone leaves you without help or they leave you in a precarious position, right?
Exactly.
There are a couple theories on this, but I think the one with the most weight behind it is that it comes from an old dice-based backgammon-style game, which had the goal of trying to leave your opponent as far behind as possible.
It’s something that you still would do in the game Cribbage, where I think they even still use leaving someone in the lurch. It’s when you win before your opponent even moves their pieces halfway around the board.
So you get 61 points and they get fewer than 30 points. So they’re in the lurch, literally. You’re like more than halfway ahead of them.
This game was spelled L-O-U-R-C-H-E, lurch. And in old French, that word meant deceived, embarrassed, trapped, or duped.
The game is now called Trick Track in French. And it looks a lot like backgammon, but it’s played a little differently.
But it’s all about rolling dice and moving your pieces up and down these pointed rows. It’s really the heart of it. It’s about just getting so far ahead that the other person has no chance at all of catching up.
Now, there’s another little side note to this, which is there was at one point a hideout for poachers. Say they’d go to the king’s forest and lie in wait looking for a game that they were not supposed to get.
This hideout would be called the lurch or the lurch. And this probably still comes from this game as well. Just this idea that you are in this place where you are deceiving or duping the game master, the person in charge of the king’s forest and the king’s game.
Well, how interesting comes from a game. Never would have guessed.
Yeah, yeah.
But it’s an old, old word. It’s, again, from the French. So many of our words come from French.
Well, I knew you guys would have some insight into that. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Danny.
Be well.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Absolutely.
Bye-bye.
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