Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 20 March 2010

It has always seemed to me that in the lyrics by David Baddiel and Frank Skinner for their song marking the European football championships of 1996 the word hurt enters awkwardly, for the sake of the rhyme: ‘Three lions on a shirt, Jules Rimet still gleaming,/ Thirty years of hurt never stopped me dreaming.’ Perhaps I would say the same if they had reached for the word dirt instead.

Already a subscriber? Log in

This article is for subscribers only

Subscribe today to get 3 months' delivery of the magazine, as well as online and app access, for only £3.

  • Weekly delivery of the magazine
  • Unlimited access to our website and app
  • Enjoy Spectator newsletters and podcasts
  • Explore our online archive, going back to 1828

Most popular

Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

My 14 years of hurt over this weak rhyme have been overtaken by weeks of annoyance about the stress put on the name of the film The Hurt Locker by some broadcasters. They stress the first syllable of Locker, as if the locker were hurt. Broadcasters put the stress on the wrong words if they can, and the Oscar-winning film gave them a prominent new opportunity.

I did not know what a hurt locker was, unless it was a sort of Pandora’s Box. I also knew that military policemen have a nasty habit of putting miscreants in steel lockers to punish them.

In 2005 Urban Dictionary, an online wiki-effort of sometimes spectacular unreliability, made hurt locker its word of the day, with the definition: ‘A figurative place where someone is said to be or will be, if they are getting or expect to be getting hurt or beaten.’ It gave as an example: ‘With that team, you are entering a rather large hurt locker.’

The film’s writer Mark Boal, who had observed the work of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in 2004, told the New Yorker: ‘If a bomb goes off, you’re going to be in the hurt locker. That’s how they used it in Baghdad.’

A search for the earliest use of hurt locker finds examples from 20 February 1966, in a report from Vietnam by the Associated Press agency published in American papers such as the Modesto Bee. The context, slightly disjointed in the report, is an attempt to interrupt supplies of rice to the enemy. ‘“If an army marches on its stomach, old Charlie is in the hurt locker,” a US adviser in Phu Yen Province said. Charlie is an American nickname for the Viet Cong.’

The search for this was accomplished in 0.09 seconds by the Google archive facility. Possibly the phrase languishes in an earlier print source not yet gleaned by the internet. After its initial military usage, it had been employed almost exclusively in American sports reporting, until this film came along. I doubt I’ll ever use it, but I’m glad at last I understand it.

Read next

Also in Society

Also by Dot Wordsworth

Latest

Comments

Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.

Already a subscriber? Log in