leave someone in the lurch

Example: “The drummer quit a week before the tour and left the band in the lurch.”

Origin: Traces to lourche, a 16th-century French dice game resembling backgammon, in which incurring "a lurch" meant falling so far behind the other players that recovery was effectively impossible. The game's name likely came from a regional German word for "left" — lurtsch or lortsch — by way of Middle Dutch loyrtz. English cribbage later adopted the same idea directly: a player is "lurched" if they fail to get even halfway around the scoring board before their opponent finishes the game entirely, a real, humiliating form of defeat. The figurative sense of abandoning someone in a genuinely difficult, unsupported position had already entered English by the late 1500s, with Thomas Nashe's 1596 Saffron Walden providing an early example of exactly this usage.