“Carry the day” is an English idiom meaning to win a battle or victory. There are over 25,000 idioms in English, which can be confusing for language learners. The phrase likely comes from Latin and is used in literature, including works by Charles Dickens.
The English language is full of idioms, or phrases that appear to have meaning but actually convey a figurative meaning. “Carry the day” is one of these idioms. “Bringing the day” doesn’t infer the impossible lifting of a 24-hour period, but winning a battle or victory or making it successful. For example: “After many successive defeats, the soldiers believed their general’s new plan would succeed.”
It is estimated that there are more than 25,000 idiomatic idioms in the English language, not counting the minor regional idioms that abound in the English-speaking world. The meanings of idioms could easily confuse and frustrate an English language learner. A student who gets up at the crack of dawn every day to put on his thinking cap might end up eating his hat only after working on the highways and byways of baffling English idioms like these.
The saying “to bring the day” undoubtedly comes from the Latin “victoriam reportare,” which means “to take away the honors of the day,” according to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Certainly the Romans knew victory, and it is no surprise that the phrase has infiltrated the English language, an amalgam of German and Latin roots with numerous dialects and regional varieties. Not limited to describing victory in war, the phrase “carry on” could also be likened to an inspirational figure or act of heroism or as a superlative of one object or great work over another.
The use of “bring the day” in classical literature is sparse, because the idiom is more commonly used in the vernacular as slang. The phrase is used in Charles Dickens’ preface to his masterpiece David Copperfield, in which Andrew Lang from the 1917 reprint of the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction compares the novel to another Dickens classic, The Pickwick Papers. Dickens also used the phrase in his book A Tale of Two Cities, but the reference seems to be more literal – “bring the wine of the day” – than figurative.
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