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| | World Wide Words: Lead-pipe cinch |
 | | A saddle that had been tightly cinched was secure, so something that was a cinch was a safe or sure thing, an idea which developed into the slang sense of something that was a certainty. |
 | | The idea was presumably that if a leather cinch was effective, one made of lead would be even more so, or that one’s grip on lead pipe could be firmer than on a leather strap. |
 | | If you want to cinch something really tightly, you put something like a stick, or perhaps a piece of pipe, through the rope loop that goes around the object to be held, and you twist it. |
| www.worldwidewords.org /qa/qa-lea2.htm (627 words) |
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