For Churchill, “Business as usual” was defiant. For Martin Luther King, it was the thing to defy…

Many sources – including the venerable BBC – suggest that the phrase “business as usual” was created by Winston Churchill.

A page for students on the BBC website says: “Business as Usual: Phrase coined by Churchill to suggest how British society should react to the wartime situation.”

I love the BBC, but it’s wrong about that.

The phrase “business as usual” can be found in newspaper articles dating back to the early 1800s (as I’ve confirmed by searches in the great online resource, NewspaperArchive.com). The original usage was literal, as in “the banks were open for business as usual.”

But Churchill did give the phrase a famous new political meaning during World War I.

In a speech on November 9, 1914, he sent a message of defiance to the Germans and inspiration to the British people by saying:

“The British people have taken for themselves this motto – ‘Business carried on as usual during alterations on the map of Europe.’”

Churchill’s quote was remembered and reused in the same spirit during World War II.

In 1940 and 1941, when German planes were making devastating nightly bombing raids on London, shopkeepers put notices on their bombed shops that said “Business as Usual.” These signs were both a message of defiance and inspiration, echoing the intent of Churchill’s original speech.

Then, somehow, in the decades after World War II, the phrase took on a negative connotation that meant complacency and blind obedience to the status quo.

For example, in 1962, a statement by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) condemned the typical college campus as “a place of commitment to business-as-usual.”

The following year, the phrase was used with a negative meaning by civil rights leader, Martin Luther King.

It was in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963 in Washington D.C. Referring to recent race riots, King said:

“Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.”

Today, “business as usual” is heard in both a positive and a negative sense, depending on the context.

You can either be happy that something is back to “business as usual” – or unhappy that it’s stuck in some boring or bad “business as usual” rut.

Linguistically, that’s not usual.

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NOTE: If you’re interested in the origins of famous quotations and phrases, check out my Quotation Bookstore.

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