hitch [ME] The earliest sense of hitch was ‘to move or lift up with a jerk’. The meaning ‘to fasten or tether’ dates from the early 17th century, and is the one that features in such expressions as to get hitched [M19th] for get married and to hitch your wagon to a star. The US philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson introduced this second phrase in 1870 in the sense ‘to have high aspirations’. A hitch meaning ‘an obstacle’ is probably from the word’s use to mean ‘a knot in a rope’. Hitch-hike dates from the 1920s.