Anyway... she's asleep, turned away from me on her side. The usual strategems and repositionings have failed to induce narcosis in me, so I decide to settle myself against the soft zigzag of her body. As I move and start to nestle my shin against a calf whose muscles are loosened by sleep, she senses what I'm doing, and without waking reaches up with her left hand and pulls the hair off her shoulders on to the top of her head, leaving me her bare nape to nestle in. Each time she does this I feel a shudder of love at the exactness of this sleeping courtesy.

You think she's really awake when she does it? I suppose it could sound like a conscious courtesy -- an agreeable gesture, but hardly one denoting that love has roots below the gum of consciousness. Still, I can offer you further proof. Her hair falls, you see, to her shoulders. But a few years ago, when they promised us the summer heat would last for months, she had it cut short. Her nape was bare for kissing all day long.

In the dark, she would, with a soft murmur, try to lift the lost hair from the back of her neck.

-- Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

What a strange phrase: "die hard." "Hard" is one of those old Anglo-Saxon adjectives, like "fast," that serves as its own adverb. It needs no -ly. This gives me an odd sense of anxiety: I always want to translate the old aphorism into something clumsier but more correct-sounding. "Old habits die with difficulty." "Old habits take a long time to die." (The word "hardly" has transformed into something nearly opposite the original meaning of the word "hard"; now it denotes scarcity rather than presence. Nevertheless, inserting it into the proverb creates its own kind of truth as well: Old habits hardly die.)

Of course, the awkwardness of the proverb is exactly what John McTiernan was punning on when he directed an action movie called Die Hard. For a while, the 1990 sequel was to be called Die Harder, which makes no sense at all, even in the freakish grammar of movie titles. Eventually the cute-but-inappropriate comparative was replaced with a number: the movie is now known by the more matter-of-fact title Die Hard 2. I suppose the message is that Bruce Willis resembles a bad habit, returning over and over again after a thousand fatal explosions.

But I think the thing that bothers me most about the phrase "old habits die hard" is that there is no hardness in their death. No machine guns, no collapsing buildings, no exploding helicopters.

I know, I know: in this phrase, "hard" isn't supposed to mean rocky or explosive; it simply means "with difficulty." I get that. Even so, the phrase rings false to me. Julian Barnes has it right: old habits die after a long, slow descent; stubbornly, yes, but slyly too, with pride and dignity and perhaps even a sense of humour. Like Barnes' lover, they slip into sleep, but resurface when you least expect it.

When a man in a pub pats his pocket in search of the cigarettes he gave up five years ago, his habit has snuck up on him, surprising him with a wink. When a woman catches the E train headed toward a home in Queens that she gave up months ago for a new loft in Brooklyn, I refuse to characterize her flush of embarrassment as a hard feeling at all. Some things die hard, and perhaps you'll find those things in cheesy 80's action movies. But some things, like a strand of hair against the back of a loved one's neck, leave ghosts and footprints when they die, if they die at all.