Mind your language
When Gisela Stuart was talking to the dear old editor on the wireless the other morning, she used the phrase 'between a rock and a hard place'. People say this almost as if it were a well-known quotation from the Bible or Shakespeare.
This impression is reinforced by the obscurity of 'hard place'. We should not be surprised if it had been adopted by a biblical translator to render something from the Psalms, about the Lord as a rock, a stronghold, a fortress. But this is not the case.
The phrase is fairly new and American. The word place itself, by contrast, is old. It is found on the vellum of the Lindisfarne Gospels, which were written out in the early 8th century, though the English words were written as a gloss between the lines a couple of hundred years later. It comes in St Matthew's Gospel (vi 5), where Jesus speaks of people who love to pray 'on street corners', in angulis plateamm as the Latin says, or in Old English huommum thara plcecena. The late Latin platea, which the English borrows, could mean 'street', 'market-place' or 'square'. The even older Old English word was stow.
As for the American rock and hard place, the earliest source found is a publication called Dialect Notes (1921), which gives the meaning 'to be bankrupt', adding, 'Common in Arizona in recent panics; sporadic in California'. So the context seems to be mining. It is true that, in 1917, 1,000 striking copper miners in Arizona were deported, but the reference is doubtless wider.
Internet philologists try unhelpfully to make the phrase fit the tale of Scylla and Charybdis, from the Odyssey. Scylla does live on a cliff, but she is not a rock, she is a monster with six heads on long necks, each with three rows of teeth to 'crunch anyone to death in a moment, and she sits deep within her shady cell thrusting out her heads and peering all round the rock, fishing for dolphins', as Circe warns Odysseus, in Samuel Butler's translation. Charybdis is the monster that operates the nearby whirlpool thrice a day. Circe advises Odysseus to keep to the Scylla side, 'for you had better lose six men than your whole crew'. That's what he does, but he is sickened by the death of his six men.
Perhaps it is a measure of our cultural poverty that we have dumped Scylla and Charybdis for a figure that is scarcely clearer but certainly duller.
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