do or die, to

To make a last-ditch effort. This extreme measure was first recorded in print in the seventeenth century. An early use occurs in John Fletcher’s play The Island Princess (1621), where a character says, “Do or die” (2.4). Before long it came to be used figuratively, although it reverted to lit- eral use (and changed form) in Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854): “Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.”