The word originally used may have been different from spit, although it has the same number of letters, but you get the drift.

BBC: A dead vice-president and the new Welsh political map

Maybe the government can block Lord Puttnam and not provide a compromise, but the lesson from this episode is that the Parliamentary supporters of press regulation are not going to get bored and drift away.

BBC: Press regulation: it's back

And those electrons drift up into a gas layer, and when they hit the gas and you get another flash of light.

BBC: Dark Matter: Experiment to shed light on dark particles