Hurt Locker Etymology

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Claire from Seattle, Washington.

Hello, Claire. Welcome.

Thank you.

What would you like to talk about?

Well, I’m calling about the movie The Hurt Locker.

Oh, yeah. Nice film.

Yeah, it was great. And I was wondering about the title.

When it came out last summer, and I just saw it recently, but it was getting a lot of great reviews.

And the first few times I heard the phrase, it sort of sounded like the emphasis was, it sounded like a locker had been injured, which doesn’t make sense, of course.

But it sort of sounded like you might say the hurt puppy or something like that.

I thought it was the hurt person in junior high when I first heard it.

Yeah, so I was curious to see.

And so before I went to see the movie, I looked it up.

And actually, the word hurt, it’s more of a noun.

It seems to be a metaphor for a place of great suffering.

So you’re in a world of hurt. You’re in the hurt locker.

So I’m wondering where that started and how long it’s been around.

I haven’t heard it in other movies or literature.

There’s a lot of good work done on this.

The Historical Dictionary of America, in slang by Dr. John Leiter, has a couple of really great entries about hurt with some of the varieties of expressions that use us, including a world of hurt or in the hurt bag or in the hurt seat or, of course, in the hurt locker.

And my colleague Ben Zimmer, who is the new language columnist for The New York Times, wrote an article on the Visual Thesaurus website in March where he talked about the hurt locker, and he found a slightly earlier use of it from 1966 and another from 1967.

So we find from these articles that it was at least as early as Vietnam, where soldiers and journalists covering the war were talking about this place of just intense emotional pain.

And it’s not necessarily about the violence done to the body so much that it’s the body that is done to your well-being or done to your mind.

The emotional thing.

Yeah.

So you had it exactly right.

And it’s even, especially if it’s deliberate or the pain has something to do with an orchestrated attack upon you or your troops or your men.

So is it sort of limited then the use to the military?

I guess I kind of also thought of as something that you might find in sports if you had a bad training session or something.

Yeah, you could. I think most of the uses are about war.

Most of them are in the coverage of war.

So if not by soldiers and people in the military or associated with the military, then by the journalists who are covering those people and the things that they do.

Yeah, and the phrase was also used in a very powerful poem back in 2004.

I don’t know if you’ve seen that one by Brian Turner.

We should link to it on the website because it’s a really wrenching poem.

It’s very short but very powerful.

And it ends with open the hurt locker and see what there is of knives and teeth.

Open the hurt locker and learn how rough men come hunting for souls.

It’s really powerful.

Like a movie.

That is very powerful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I guess it would be too much if I told my kids they had to clean their room or they’d be in the hurt locker.

No.

You know, my grandfather, he used World of Hurt.

He’s like, boy, I will put the hurt on you or I’ll put the World of Hurt on you.

And so maybe that’s a better one to stick to.

Yeah, absolutely.

The world of hurt.

Maybe their great-grandkids will use it that way, but for right now, I think it’s a little too close to home.

Well, now, I mean, that’s a great title then for that movie.

Yeah, it’s fantastic, right?

Yeah.

Well, thank you.

Thanks for bringing it up.

Take care.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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