[Ads-l] =?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=9Chard-boiled=E2=80=9D_?=(school of fiction)

Jonathan Lighter 00001aad181a2549-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Tue Jul 1 14:07:35 UTC 2025


1877 _American Israelite_  (Cincinnati, O.) (Oct. 12) 4 [Newspapers.com]:
That was a hard-boiled fellow.

1913 _St.Joseph [Mo.] News-Press_ (Jan. 24) 8 [Newspapers.com]:  The plain
people must have their hard-boiled detective stories.

JL

On Tue, Jul 1, 2025 at 7:10 AM Ben Yagoda <byagoda at udel.edu> wrote:

> OED, "2.c.
> Designating a gritty, realistic style of fiction, esp. detective fiction;
> of or characteristic of such fiction.”
>
> First cite, January 1929.
>
> Here’s an earlier one, from *The American Mercury, *May 1926, via Google
> Books: "How they sentimentalize about themselves and their pasts, this
> hard-boiled school of writers!”
>
> The phrase “hard-boiled,” meaning tough (OED 2.b.), had been around since
> the late nineteenth century, according to the OED, and was in fairly wide
> circulation at the time. In Hemingway’s *The Sun Also Rises *(1926), the
> narrator, Jake Barnes, reflects, "“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled
> about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
>
> The OED has a citation under this definition from *Century Magazine *in
> June 1928: "A hard-boiled, two-fisted, super-sleuth of the secret service
> tells the story of his adventurous dealings with the underworld of all
> nations."
>
> Ben
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org


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