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What Does Hurt Locker Mean?
 The Hurt Locker won Oscares for Best Picture and Best Director at the 82nd Academy Awards on Sunday night. The BBC has an interesting article about the meaning of "hurt locker." The BBC says the press kit for the film indicates that hurt locker is GI slang for a severe injury. The article says the first recorded usage example from the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1966 in a newspaper story about the Vietnam war.
"If a bomb goes off, you're going to be in the hurt locker. That's how they used it in Baghdad," Mark Boal told the New Yorker. "It means slightly different things to different people, but all the definitions point to the same idea. It's somewhere you don't want to be."
Although American sports writers have used the phrase for at least two decades
- to refer to injured players, or a team languishing in the league - the Oxford English Dictionary's first recorded example dates from 1966, says Fiona McPherson, senior editor of the OED's new words group.
"It's from a Texas newspaper and it says 'If an army marches on its stomach, Old Charlie is in the hurt locker'. Old Charlie is the Viet Cong. It is similar to the phrases 'world of hurt' or 'world of pain'.
The term hurt locker has also been used in sports journalism to indicate players on the disabled list.
Posted on March 10, 2010
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