Abandoned someone or something; or crashed a vehicle into a ditch.
From Old English 'dic' (ditch, dike) and Old Frisian 'dike.' The verb 'ditch' originally meant to dig ditches, then evolved to mean throwing something away in a ditch, then metaphorically to abandon anything.
Emergency pilots talk about 'ditching' over water as a last-resort crash landing, which is why the term sounds controlled even though it's violent—calling a crash a 'ditch' makes it sound planned rather than catastrophic.
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