Die Hard

"Die Hard" probably conjures up images of Bruce Willis jumping from an airplane or crawling through an air vent or walking barefoot through broken glass. But the phrase pre-dates the movie series by at least 200 years.

In 18th century England, before gallows platforms were built with trapdoors, the body of a hanged person twitched and jerked until the victim strangled to death. Sometimes condemned people arranged to have someone hang onto their legs to make their death quicker. The invention of a trapdoor, upon which the condemned stood until the door bolt was released, produced a quicker death because generally the sudden jerk of dropping through the door broke the person's neck. This was considered a relatively easy death. In contrast, the gallows without a trapdoor was a "hard way to die." The ones who struggled longest were referred to as die hards, because they seemed to refuse their inevitable fate.

Hangings aside, it was one of the Napoleonic Wars that solidified the phrase "die hard."

During the Battle of Albuera in 1811, Lieutenant-Colonel William Inglis commanding the 57th Regiment was injured. He refused to quit the battlefield, instead urging his badly outnumbered men forward with the cry, "Die Hard, the 57th, Die Hard!" He was urging them to fight with every ounce of energy they had and kill as many of the enemy as they could in pre-retribution for their own deaths.

When the battle was over and the casualties numbered, the 57th had sustained a 66 percent casualty rate. The Regiment subsequently received the nickname, the Die Hards.

The phrase took on political meaning in Britain when it became the nickname for those who insisted they would "die in the ditch," rather than agree to whatever it was they opposed. From there the term was used to describe a person who could not be swayed from their beliefs.

The term is sometimes written as two words, as a hyphenated word or, more and more frequently, as a single word.