[Ads-l] hill to die on

[Ben Zimmer]

>From an interview with Aaron Sorkin about his Broadway adaptation of "To
Kill a Mockingbird":

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/02/magazine/aaron-sorkin-interview.html
"A specific anachronism I cut -- when I was told it was an anachronism --
was a line where Jim said, 'That's not the hill I want to die on.' Which
turns out to be a phrase that developed in World War II."

I'm not sure how Sorkin and his researchers determined that this expression
"developed in World War II." As noted by Wiktionary and some other online
sources, there's a literal "hill to die on" in Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom
the Bell Tolls" (1940):

"If he had known how many men in history have had to use a hill to die on
it would not have cheered him any..."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:hill_to_die_on

As for the figurative use of the idiom (variously expressed as "a hill one
wants/chooses/is willing to die on," "a hill worth dying on," etc. -- often
in the negative), the earliest I've found so far is from 1970.

---
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/45998912/hill-to-die-on/
Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1970, p. IV4, col. 1
"We all knew what hills we wanted to die on," explains under-35 delegate
June Simmons, a graduate at USC working on her masters degree as a
psychiatric social worker.
---
Wall Street Journal, June 12, 1975, p. 25, col. 3 [ProQuest]
Says [California State] Superintendent [Wilson] Riles: "I'm willing to
fight for Early Childhood Education. I've been in education and politics
long enough to know that you can't choose to die on every hill -- but this
is one hill I'm willing to die on."
---

(There are similar quotes from Riles in other articles from 1975-76.)

Can anyone find earlier examples? The OED doesn't have it, nor do any other
dictionaries I checked besides Wiktionary (which defines "hill to die on"
as "an issue to pursue with wholehearted conviction and/or single-minded
focus, with little or no regard to the cost").

--bgz

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