Meaning:
The worst or most despicable example of something.
Background:
There's not a great deal to be said about this little expression. It has been
suggested that it derives from the age-old practice of sawing timber in which
two sawyers cut a log longways - the senior being at the top and the junior
in a pit below. The top sawyer was called the top dog and it is surmised that
the lower sawyer experienced `the pits'. There are two problems with that
explanation.
Firstly, the expression `top dog' may be associated with sawing but there's
no proof that it is.
Secondly, `the pits' originated in the USA in the 1950s - long after people
stopped using saw pits. Around the same time, and logic dictates that this
came earlier, Americans began using `pits' as shorthand slang for armpits.
`The pits', with its suggestion of bad odour, was synonymous with `the
armpits'. The first example that I can find of `the pits' being used as slang
with that meaning is from Newsweek, November 1953:
A bad exam experience would be `I'm wasted' at Howard... `It was the pits'
at Vassar.
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
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I saw the title phrase a week ago and had been scouring my memory for the pits.
There weren't many, nor did they hurt much in hindsight. Moreover, each time had
its hope, a comeback, a new goal to achieve, or a different story to tell, and
always I could take comfort in improving my English.
And then I read in Nancy Mairs's "On Being A Cripple":
These two elements, the plenty and the privation, are never pure, nor are the
delight and wretchedness that accompany them.
which jibed so well with the idea of the yin and yang and convinced me again
that pits or peaks don't exist.
