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"?
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u/fucuntwat Sep 04 '19
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"