In his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, Tim Walz described waiting to hear the results of his wife’s IVF treatments like this: “The pit in your stomach when the phone would ring, and the absolute agony when we heard the treatments hadn’t worked.”
In a recent book group book, My Side of the River, I read that author Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez also had a pit in her stomach.
But “pit in your stomach” isn’t the expression, or it didn’t used to be. Until a few years ago, we instead felt something in the pits of our stomachs.
Apprehension or disappointment gives you a sick feeling, way down deep in your abdomen. There’s science to this: your body’s nervous system registers strong emotion, which you feel not just in your mind but, in this case, in your abdominal cavity, in the bottom, or pit, of your stomach. Like this: “I felt a flutter of nervousness in the pit of my stomach.”
But the expression has apparently evolved. Apparently folks believe the expression describes feeling something heavy in their stomachs and call that something a pit. The website Quora entertains lots of questions about this, many of them worded something like, “Why do I have a pit in my stomach?” One person asks, “How do I get rid of the pit in my stomach?”
A snarky responder says, “What? Did you swallow a peach?”
We snarky traditionalists can shake our fists or howl at the moon, but there’s probably no going back. Language changes. The horse is out of the barn, to use another old expression. We no longer have feelings in the pit of our stomach. We have pits in our stomachs.
Here’s another one:
All lawyers are not the same.
When they mean: Not all lawyers are the same.
Only pay for what you need.
When they mean: Pay for only what you need.
This kind of mistake is so pervasive in advertising that I’m glad to have a mute button!
Wow! That’s the pits…
I’m glad you cleared that up. I thought I remembered the phrase differently, but I hear it this new way so often that, to use another new coinage, I assumed I misremembered it.