ELEVATOR PITCH: pitch, one of those ¨tricky¨ words to learn.

A few weeks ago, when doing an activity with my advanced students pitch, the word that has triggered this post, came up in the form of a crossword clue:

Money in brief followed by an irritation of the skin has very black results.

The answer was given straight away in the dialogue where such definition was inserted -pitch-,  but it took me a while to come up with the explanation which would associate both parties. Actually, it came right away when discussing the activity with the students. 

• Money in brief........p(ence)
• An irritation of the skin......itch
• Has very black results........pitch black 

A follow-up question was what does pitch mean exactly? It's certainly one of these words that may trap a teacher in a winding explanation and still leave the student at a loss as there's nothing they like best but a straight equivalent to copy down in their notebooks. 

You're probably aware of what I mean by now if you have clicked on the word pitch and read the different answers provided by wordreference.com, both in the English definition entry and the English-Spanish one.

Pitch is one of these chamaleonlike words that has sneaked in different theme-areas of life so it gets complicated for a student of English who is constantly seeking for a straight-forward answer to their vocabulary queries.

To mention but a few, the word pitch appears in sports, a football pitch, in linguistics Pitch accent and in sales the elevator pitch. 

As my students hadn't heard of the elevator pitch term before and the class was about to end I encouraged them to do some research themselves. I also promised I'd come back to it in the near future. Not so sure myself how I'd introduce this in another class I thought I might as well write a post that would feature not only the latter, but also the word pitch itself. Furthermore, I find it really self-encouraging to link both my blog and my teaching.

I've selected an article from Bloomberg Business Week: 

The Perfect (Elevator) Pitch by Aileen Pincus 

And this YouTube video which rides you up in the hope of your grasping its basic idea: