Lumber. As the Lombards were the bankers, so also they were the pawnbrokers of the Middle Ages; indeed, as they would often advance money upon pledges, the two businesses were very closely joined, would often run in, to one another. The ‘lumber’ room was originally the Lombard room, or room where the Lombard banker and broker stowed away his pledges; ‘lumber’ then, as in the passage from Butler, the pawns and pledges themselves. As these would naturally often accumulate here till they became out of date and unserviceable, the steps are easy to be traced by which the word came to possess its present meaning.
Lumber, potius lumbar, as to put one’s clothes to lumbar, i.e. pignori dare, oppignorare.—Skinner, Etymologicon.
And by an action falsely laid of trover
The lumber for their proper goods recover.
Butler, Upon Critics.
They put up all the little plate they had in the lumber, which is pawning it, till the ships came.—Lady Murray, Lives of George Baillie and of Lady Grisell Baillie.
Lurch. ‘To lurch’ is seldom used now except of a ship, which ‘lurches’ when it makes something of a headlong dip in the sea; the fact that by so doing it, partially at least, hides itself, and so ‘lurks,’ explains this employment of the word. But ‘to lurch,’ generally as an active verb, was of much more frequent use in early English; and soon superinduced on the sense of lying concealed that of lying in wait with the view of intercepting and seizing a prey. After a while this superadded notion of intercepting and seizing some booty quite thrust out that of lying concealed; as in all three of the quotations which follow. See Skeat’s Dictionary.
It is not an auspicate beginning of a feast, nor agreeable to amity and good fellowship, to snatch or lurch one from another, to have many hands in a dish at once, striving a vie who should be more nimble with his fingers.—Holland, Plutarch’s Morals, p. 679.
I speak not of many more [discommodities of a residence]: too far off from great cities, which may hinder business; or too near them, which lurcheth all provisions, and maketh every thing dear.—Bacon, Essays, 45 (ed. Abbott, ii. p. 50).
At the beginning of this war [the Crusades] the Pope’s temporal power in Italy was very slender; but soon after he grew within short time without all measure, and did lurch a castle here, gain a city there from the emperor, while he was employed in Palestine.—Fuller, Holy War, b. i. c. 11.