Newspaper headlines and radio announcers had a vocabulary of short words replacing longer words. I was thinking about famed. It was standard headlinese, but it only saved one letter vs famous. It also saved a syllable, which must have been why it stuck.
While pondering this deep philosophical conundrum, I noticed a headline in the local paper on an important subject.
Democrats on Spokane County Commission to pitch moratorium on data centers
Crap! They’re surrendered to Altman! They’re going to build it anyway, despite the city’s moratorium!
Oops. Reading the article, turns out they were doing a sales pitch for adding a county-level ban. They were throwing the idea in, not throwing it out. Headlinese can be ambiguous.
Looking up pitch, the word itself is doubly double. Pitch as in tar is extremely slow and sticky, nearly identical in all the IE languages. Pitch as in throw is obscure. It first appeared in 1520 as driving a stake for a tent. There’s no path from tar to tent. After tent, the other throwing senses were easy developments.
Polistra's Mill 