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One of the frontrunners for Best Picture in Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony is Kathryn Bigelow's tense depiction of a U.S. bomb squad unit in Iraq, The Hurt Locker. The movie's official website says of the title, "In Iraq, it is soldier vernacular to speak of explosions as sending you to 'the hurt locker." In fact, like so much American military slang, hurt locker (along with related hurt expressions) dates back to the Vietnam War. By Ben Zimmer
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