Tribune inquiry: in harm's way

[Wilson Gray]

On Oct 13, 2004, at 1:32 AM, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Fwd: Tribune inquiry: in harm's way
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> an exchange with a reporter.  anybody know anything about "in harm's
> way" pre-1965?

The movie was based on the novel, "Harm's Way," (sic) by James Bassett,
published in 1962.

-Wilson Gray

>
> 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...
>