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Let's all just pitch in and come up with various definitions of "pitch." Tar (black as pitch), of course. The baseball season consists of one pitch after another; good pitching trumps good hitting. And at our house, we throw out unwanted things, pitching them toward new homes. Finally, but not definitively, pitch is what you do with an idea that you are trying to sell to an editor or a producer. You pitch your outline in order to snag the contract.
And then there's musical pitch, some of it even perfect. I once heard a musician refer to a slightly out-of-tune performance as "a bit pitchy". Our family, collectively, has prided itself on having a good sense of pitch; that is, we can sing on key and can tell when someone else's pitch is off. Well, pride goeth, as we know, before a fall. Some years ago, when there were still three of us, my sisters and I were joking around in a recording studio (don't ask) and sang our version of "Daddy's Little Girl", the only trio we have left in our repertoire. By the end, we were congratulating ourselves on the mellowness of our three similar voices—and then the recording engineer began the playback. We were painfully out of tune. We doubled over with laughter (and humiliation) and never again tried to record a sisters' trio.
Recently the Globe & Mail used "pitch" ambiguously in a headline. Did the group in question promote the idea or throw the idea away? Unfortunately, I didn't bother to read the story, having been put off by the confusing head, so I still can't answer. But the moral is: don't use "pitch" in a headline unless you're talking about baseball.
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
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