‘many, too, must stay at home to carry on the daily business of life, to provide the means of feeding and paying the Navy and the Army, and even to manufacture the necessary instruments of warfare’ ( The Times December 5th 1914) As in the example below, uses of this kind required a direct or indirect object. C arrying on is made a serious business often collocating with words of industry and labour. Discussion of the need to carry on the war, to carry on work, or to carry on the fight or struggle are easily found. Carry on had already been given three senses by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of 1755 the recent entry in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (in a section published in 1888) had expanded this to five. Based in WW1 rather than WWII, the determination to “ carry on”, had already featured prominently in a wide range of private and public discourses.Īs war began in August 1914, uses of carry (and carry on) were, as we might expect, plentiful. Devising their poster in 1939, the shadow MOI drew, in fact, not on a blank slate of language but made use of what was already an established collocation of war-time use. Slogans, however, also have beginnings and “ carrying on” – as a specific injunction to maintain war-time resilience, and with particular reference to qualities of fortitude on the Home Front – already had a long (if forgotten) history. Originally intended to strengthen the war-time spirit, and to reassure as a new war began, the posters were – with a few exceptions – pulped in 1940. A crisis of confidence– founded in concerns that it might seem patronizing or even annoying – led to its swift demise. It was, nevertheless, to be a notably short-lived campaign. As Simon Eliot explains, almost three million copies of a MOI poster urging the populace to ‘keep calm and carry on’ had been distributed across the British Isles by the early autumn of 1939. Its origins as slogan have been carefully located in WWII, being credited to the shadow Ministry of Information. ‘One of the most recognisable slogans in British history’, as Henry Irving notes, it can, in modern English, be found inscribed on anything from mugs and cards to clothing or bags. The injunction to Keep Calm and Carry on, with or without various mutations, has, in recent years, become ubiquitous.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |