Pitched Battle vs. Pitch Battle

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, is this Martha?

This is Martha.

Who’s this?

Hi, I’m Elizabeth Bird calling from Bozeman, Montana.

Well, welcome, Elizabeth.

Hi, Elizabeth.

What’s up?

Good to talk with you.

Hi, Grant.

So my question was, I read in an article in the paper, I don’t remember if it was a local article or an AP piece, but it mentioned a pitch battle.

And I had always thought it was pitched with an ED battle.

And I kind of perused the definitions of pitch in my dictionary and didn’t really find something that seemed to fit.

And then yesterday I heard another news piece where they were talking about starvation had reached a serious pitch.

And I wondered if pitched battle and a pitch of extreme is the same pitch and how it’s related to the other definitions of pitch.

You’ve chosen a real humdinger of a word.

Pitch is super complicated here.

I want to address here a specific question, though, about whether or not the newspaper article should have had pitch battle or pitched battle, whether or not there should have been E-D after pitch.

And it should have been pitched battle, P-I-T-C-H-E-D.

That’s the standard form of that compound.

Unless they were actually throwing a black sticky substance at each other, it probably should not be a pitch battle.

Or it occurred in a baseball stadium.

Right.

A pitch battle?

They’re just, I don’t really, yeah.

Was it a baseball game?

No?

No, no, no.

So the black sticky stuff, the tar-like stuff, that’s a whole different pitch.

And it’s even got a different etymological origin.

This other pitch has all these different meanings, and they’re all connected, but we’re not quite sure how to say we meaning dictionary makers.

So pitch as in pitch of the voice, pitch as in the angle of a roof, pitch as in to throw something.

And then we now have this pitch as in pitch battle.

This particular one is related to pitching a tent.

You put up your tent. It’s called pitching a tent.

You put your stakes in the ground. You put the poles into place.

You create a shelter with an angled roof.

Perhaps that has something to do with it. Maybe it’s related to pitch as an angle.

And the other thing it has to do with is a pitch as in a football pitch, what the British would call the field where they play soccer, right?

Because both of these are referred to a very specific place for a very specific action.

Formally, a pitched battle was a battle at a prearranged time and place.

Martha is going to muster her troops.

I’m going to muster mine.

We’re going to meet at the beach at dawn.

We’re going to beat each other with pool noodles, whatever the battle is.

But that’s our pitched battle, right?

Because we’ve planned it.

We’ve bought our ranks and our forces, and we’re coming in with a plan.

However, it’s moved on a little bit to mean any really violent confrontation between large groups of people.

That was my understanding.

Yeah, that’s how it more or less is now.

So the complicated factors here are that we don’t really know the origins of pitch, but we’re pretty sure it’s related to pitch a tent, a football pitch, and so on and so forth.

Yeah, I think the common thread in all of these is basically positioning.

You know, you’re positioning a tent, you’re positioning armies on the battlefield.

And that’s a really good way to do that.

I mean, that would be a very good, broad, overarching meaning here, particularly because that would allow us to include things like pitching horseshoes.

I’m positioning my horseshoe next to the stake, right?

It’s a little harder to squeeze in the pitch of your voice in there, but we could probably mangle the definition or broaden it enough to make it fit.

The position of your voice.

Yeah, the position of your voice.

But what about, like, I thought it kind of meant extreme, like because they talked about starvation reached a serious pitch, so I wondered if it meant like an extreme point.

Well, again, that’s a position, a level, like a pitch in music.

And we can get even a little more specific than that in comparing to music.

We talk about pitches and the angle of a roof.

We talk about the degrees of a roof.

And we could easily say the hunger reached a pitch degree, just that we could say that the roof was built with a very severe pitch.

So it’s about the degree, the measure, the quantity, the force, but always about in comparison to where it could be and where it needs to be.

Yeah, and what I think is really interesting is the idea that it’s changed from the notion of two armies showing up at the same time.

By appointment.

Yeah, which is a notion that goes all the way back to ancient Greek tradition.

I mean, there are Greek words that translate as things like battles by agreement.

It’s like Alexander Hamilton showing up with Aaron Burr in a pre-appointed time.

The dawn with pistols or what have you.

Yeah.

Which leads me to the final thing I think I want to say on this, which is we got this into English from the French, which is where we got many of our military words overall and many of our military practices.

La battle ranger, basically an arranged battle or arranged battle.

Right.

Right.

But now, as you said, it can mean just a really intense battle.

That’s what I understood for years.

I only recently learned about pitch to be.

That’s pretty much where it is now, except in specialist use.

Yeah.

So it’s changed a bit.

How’s that sound?

It’s so interesting how you’ve related pitches, tone, pitches, toss, pitches, and angle of the roof.

I thought those were completely different definitions, but they’re related.

It’s wonderful.

Thank you so much for your call.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

I really enjoy your show.

Great.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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