>It would be nice if somebody could come up
with
> the origin of the word [hard-boiled as a
synonym
> for "tough]
Well, in the spirit of my public announcement at Bouchercon
2001 that the murder mystery can be traced back to that 10th
century police-procedural investigation of a serial killer,
BEOWULF, I could point out that the word is used in the sense
of "tough" or "dire" there (line 166). The 1886
Miriam-Webster reference is to Mark Twain (and as Hemingway
pointed out, everything starts with Twain), but he was
talking about
"hard-boiled, hide-bound grammar". So Chandler didn't invent
the style!
The earliest clear published usage in our sense seems to the
OED to be from 1915, Twain, American Speech, "hard-boiled egg
who wouldn't bid 90 on 100 acres", which suggests to me that
it must have been in common usage in the US well before WWI,
certainly before the US entered the war.
Conan Doyle imports it into crime writing in
1929, in Maracot Deep:
"The hard-boiled Scanlon actually fell down in a faint." So
by that time, it's being understood by an Englishman in our
sense. Enough? Enough! People have been boiling eggs for a
very long time.
MM
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