Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Word researchers at the American Dialect Society traced the phrase's specific American coinage to 1917, in newspaper coverage of a bitter Arizona copper miners' dispute, where workers were described as stuck "between a rock and a hard place" over demands they couldn't accept and a company that wouldn't budge. Older idioms expressing the exact same no-win idea, like being caught "between the devil and the deep blue sea" or facing "Scylla and Charybdis," had existed for centuries already, so whether 1917 marks a genuine new coinage or simply the first written record of an older spoken pattern isn't fully settled.