I feel a jarring sensation to hear business as usual employed in a strange sense. It is frequently used at the moment to suggest that bankers and other wicked people have gone back to their greedy ways. The dog has returned to his vomit.
Although I am not old enough to remember the war, I appreciate something of the associations of the phrase in that period. Looking through some old photographs from the Getty collection from the war years, I can see how business as usual became a powerful, often moving, declaration of defiance, when posted up as a notice or chalked on the front of a bombed shop. ‘Business as Usual, In Spite of Hitler’, read a sign on a shop in Watford, as early as October 1939.
Before the war it was less of a slogan, more a conventional phrase.
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