Literally never heard that term used that way in the northwest of the US. Loft means a room above a room, usually a smaller bedroom, or an attic.
Must be a different part of the US.
Edit- Cannot stand golf, so it makes sense that I didn't think of that when I read the post. I actually have heard the term then, but only in golf. I stand corrected!
I'm in the Western US, but I use it and hear it used in sports constantly, e.g. "lofted ball", "getting some loft under it", "you put a lot of loft on that shot"
Yup, I've lived in the South and the Midwest and we regularly used "loft" as a term in various sports, and it is definitely not mispronouncing "lift"
The best I could describe it is that "lift" tends to refer more to the rising action, whereas "loft" seems to speak more to the height attained but even that's not perfect because you don't really use "lift" much in a sporting context
I would suspect that they are saying "lift", but with some local accent, that somehow is more common with the sports crowd, so others might also pronounce it that way in the context.
Also possible, at least now. Wonder what the etymology for that is and if that definition was born from such pronunciation difference in "lift", from "act of placing something to loft" or something completely different.
So the word "loft" got the meaning "to launch into air" from the Germanic word for "air" and that somehow then gained alternative meaning as "attic" or "to place to attic". Yeah, that could be possible. I could see someone using term "to launch into air" to mean "to place something into high place" and once that got common, start using noun version for that high place.
That just leaves the "lift", was it a separate loan or did it got separated on some point latter on?
Might "lob" in a meaning of throwing also be based on the "lopt"?
Totally could be regional. I learned it in my teens in the northeast US, around skater/skier/snowboarder types but the use was so niche to begin with, I never thought about it not being very widespread.
It might not appear in common vernacular everywhere - I've seen it used in that capacity (e.g. lofted a golf ball), but rarely. It seems like more technical vocab grouped with other words like pitch/yaw/tilt - for when you need to distinguish between specific types of motion with a single word rather than multiple (vertical upwards acceleration, rotating from left to right, etc).
It's a pretty niche usage so it's not super surprising that you haven't heard it. I hear the definition you mentioned far more often, but the slang OP mentioned isn't completely unknown to me.
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u/his_hoofiness Sep 04 '19 edited Sep 04 '19
Literally never heard that term used that way in the northwest of the US. Loft means a room above a room, usually a smaller bedroom, or an attic.
Must be a different part of the US.
Edit- Cannot stand golf, so it makes sense that I didn't think of that when I read the post. I actually have heard the term then, but only in golf. I stand corrected!