{"id":391182,"date":"2010-03-05T01:16:37","date_gmt":"2010-03-05T06:16:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2159"},"modified":"2010-03-05T01:16:37","modified_gmt":"2010-03-05T06:16:37","slug":"sorry-sgt-sarver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/391182","title":{"rendered":"Sorry, Sgt. Sarver"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver has filed a lawsuit against the makers of the film <em>The Hurt Locker<\/em>, claiming that screenwriter Mark Boal based the film&#8217;s central character on him after Boal was embedded in Sarver&#8217;s bomb squad unit in Iraq. I can&#8217;t speak to the overall merits of the case, but one claim rings particularly hollow. The<a href=\"http:\/\/www.detnews.com\/article\/20100303\/METRO\/3030414\/Geoffrey-Fieger-sues--Hurt-Locker--makers-on-soldier-s-behalf\"> Detroit News<\/a> reports:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Sarver said the very title of the movie was a phrase he coined in Iraq, and that Boal asked its meaning after hearing him use it. Boal has since copyrighted the phrase, Fieger said.<br \/>\nSarver explained today that the term is akin to Davy Jones Locker, where legend says drowned sailors are kept.<br \/>\n&#8220;It&#8217;s just a horrible place you go when you mess up,&#8221; Sarver said. &#8220;It&#8217;s a mental state. A place that&#8217;s full of pain and hurt.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Unfortunately for Sarver, <em>(in the) hurt locker<\/em> is military slang dating back to 1966, as a quick trip to <a href=\"http:\/\/news.google.com\/archivesearch?as_user_ldate=1966&amp;as_user_hdate=1967&amp;q=&quot;hurt+locker&quot;\">Google News Archive<\/a> readily shows. I give the full history of the expression in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.visualthesaurus.com\/cm\/wordroutes\/2195\/\">Check it out<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>[Update: For more on the supposed &#8220;copyright&#8221; of the phrase, see Dave Wilton&#8217;s post on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wordorigins.org\/index.php\/more\/1466\/\">Wordorigins.org<\/a>.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver has filed a lawsuit against the makers of the film The Hurt Locker, claiming that screenwriter Mark Boal based the film&#8217;s central character on him after Boal was embedded in Sarver&#8217;s bomb squad unit in Iraq. I can&#8217;t speak to the overall merits of the case, but one claim rings particularly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5375,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-391182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5375"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}