Forum Topic

Do or Die

One would have thought a man of Johnson's erudition would at least have remembered his Tennyson correctly. The poet did not write "do OR die". He wrote "do AND die". See below:"Someone had blundered.   Theirs not to make reply,   Theirs not to reason why,   Theirs but to do and die."Somebody has blundered indeed, and it wasn't Alfred Lord T.

Alexander MacLeod ● 2694d1 Comments

Boris Johnson knows what he means. "Do or die" is a gamble with a decent chance of success. "Do and die" is a dead certainty, with the accent on dead. Not Johnson's sort of odds at all.On Boris Johnson, I find that, over the years, I've twice quoted the WW1 poem "The General" by Siegfried Sassoon, so I shan't do it again.

David Ainsworth ● 2694d