Can pains in the neck be cured as easily as neck injuries?

A neck injury can be a pretty uncomfortable complaint. In a quiet moment, it got the YouClaim team thinking about that well-known English expression: a pain in the neck.

Someone or something that is very annoying, a nuisance or causes distress is described as a pain in the neck. Deciding to look around the Internet for more information, the team had a quiet few minutes uncovering historical facts and figures about the phrase.

Turns out that the origins of the expression may date back to the 1800s when pain in the neck was not about personal injury but used as a euphemism for more vulgar phrases such as 'pain in the butt' and ruder, less polite words about the rear!

It is reasonable to argue that pain in the neck is a remarkably interesting saying. It would obviously be irritating, annoying and certainly a nuisance to have a pain in the backside. Neck discomfort can be similarly problematic.

Kind of intriguing to equate neck pain with backside pain - how could the two be related? Also associated with the idiom is the fact that the figurative or metaphorical 'pain' experienced by someone using the expression, is that the pain can be constant and rarely, perhaps only occasionally - or never - abating.

When is a neck injury a pain in the neck?

According to The Phrase Finder website, the term was part of American slang. It is believed to be derived from the saying "you give me a pain" and "he's a real pain".

Citing the Oxford English Dictionary, the term pain in the neck was coined around 1911. How on earth does anyone know that a term came to be used in a specific year? It seems this is the first historically recorded use of the idiom.

As English-speakers sought to find more colourful, stronger and hard-edged language, cruder variants started appearing such as "pain in the rear end" in 1937, "pain in the ass" in 1951 and "pain in the bahakas" (1990). "Pain in the butt" is also well known.

Lesser known perhaps is "pain in the keisters". Again, the Oxford English Dictionary explains all. Keister apparently means satchel and started to be used in 1881. The word came to mean 'buttocks' after being first cited in 1931, hence the "pain in the keisters" phrase came to life.

When the expression migrated to England, "pain in the arse" became popular. Interesting though that vulgar connotations of pain in the neck developed and then people, not wanting to be blunt and plain rude in more polite conversation, chose to use more delicate turns of the phrase.

Neck injuries… never realised how much of a pain in the neck they can be. Let's hope someone finds a cure soon!

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