My husband made a little joke. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lurch,’ he said, looking up from his Sunday Telegraph. In it, David Cameron had declared: ‘The battle for Britain’s future will not be won in lurching to the right.’
Lurching is a nicely pejorative word. A lurch could only be welcome accidentally. The word suddenly popped up in the 19th century. No one is known to have used it earlier than Byron in 1819, in Don Juan, where he contrives a Byronic rhyme: ‘A mind diseased no remedy can physic/ (Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick).’
Its origins are mysterious but nautical. A clue may be found in the works of William Falconer, who is more or less a one-book man. The one book was the long poem The Shipwreck (which Byron admired), the success of which in 1762 secured him an appointment in the Royal Navy.
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