Fwd: Tribune inquiry: in harm's way

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

an exchange with a reporter.  anybody know anything about "in harm's
way" pre-1965?

Begin forwarded message:

> From: ...
>
> Agreed about over-analyzing, but there's no satiating editors at
> election
> time!
>
> I will submit this article Friday; it will go to press next Tuesday to
> run
> Thursday the 21st. I could try to include ADS-L folo-ups by then if
> you get
> some good ones...
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Arnold M. Zwicky [mailto:zwicky at csli.stanford.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2004 12:23 PM
>
> On Oct 12, 2004, at 9:08 AM, you wrote:
>
>> I'm doing a piece on Bush's increasing use of the phrase "in harm's
>> way."
>> How do you hear the phrase? To me it mixes Pentagon euphemism with
>> "Red
>> State" folksiness.
>
> i hear it as a perfectly ordinary idiomatic expression, actually a bit
> on the literary side.
>
> check out "in harm's way" on google: ca. 102,000 web hits.  it's the
> title of two recent books, a 2002 book on the sinking of the USS
> Indianapolis in WWII and a 2003 book on suicide in america.  it's also
> the title of a 1965 movie directed by otto preminger.
>
> it appears in only a few dictionaries.  the Collins Cobuild Dictionary
> (a british dictionary intended for second language learners and based
> on a large corpus) has a nice entry with both "in harm's way" and "out
> of harm's way".  marked as phrasal idioms, but with no usage
> restriction indicated.
>
> the reason it appears in so few dictionaries is pretty clear: it's a
> development from the much older idiom "out of harm's way" 'out of the
> way of doing or sustaining injury' (OED2), 'in a safe place' (New
> Oxford American Dictionary).  this one's in a whole pile of
> dictionaries; OED2 has citations from 1662 through 1890; speake's
> Oxford Dictionary of Idioms has a 1997 cite from Angela's Ashes.
>
> i suspect that the 1965 movie title (a play on the older expression)
> was the source from which modern uses spread, but i don't have the time
> to do the research on it.  i could ask about it on the American Dialect
> Society list, but we might not get responses in time for whatever
> deadline you're working under.
>
> i'm beginning to think that people are overanalyzing details of both
> bush's and kerry's language...