Lost Cause and The War??!!

Lost Cause and The War??!!

 

What does it mean?

• a hopeless matter(1), something hopeless
  
  

Whatis its history(etymology)?

•  The Lost Cause is the name commonly given to an American literary and intellectual movement that sought to reconcile the traditional white society of the U.S. South to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War of 1861–1865.[1] Those who contributed to the movement tended to portray the Confederacy's cause as noble and most of its leaders as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, defeated by the Union armies through overwhelming force rather than martial skill. Proponents of the Lost Cause movement also condemned the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, claiming that it had been a deliberate attempt by Northern politicians and speculators to destroy the traditional Southern way of life.(2)
• The term Lost Cause first appeared in the title of an 1866 book by the historian Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates.(2)

Quotations:
According to the Oxford English:

lost cause n. a cause (cause n. 11) that has failed or that is unlikely to succeed; spec. the cause of the South in the American Civil War (1861–65).

1865 M. Arnold Ess. Crit. Pref. p. xix, Oxford…Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

1866 E. A. Pollard (title) The lost cause.

1901 ‘M. Twain’ Speeches (1923) 231 You testify by honoring two of us, once soldiers of the Lost Cause.

1914 Times Lit. Suppl. 7 Aug. 378 Oxford has often been called ‘the home of lost causes’, or, as Mr. Cram puts it, ‘of causes not lost but gone before’.

1933 C. Mackenzie (title) The lost cause. A Jacobite play.

1938 J. Betjeman Oxf. Univ. Chest v. 112 Wytham and Binsey are the less hackneyed of Oxford's lost causes on the edge of Oxford.

1940 C. F. Adams And Sudden Death xvii. 155 Why should I go round championing a lost cause?

1948 D. Wecter in J. G. Kerwin Civil–Military Relationships in Amer. Life 31 Their late adversaries, the United Confederate Veterans, licked their wounds and dwelt lovingly upon the Lost Cause.

1949 D. S. Freeman in B. A. Botkin Treasury Southern Folklore p. viii, Perhaps every land that has the tradition of a Lost Cause builds its monuments in a certain sentimental determination and seeks through its memorials both to exemplify and to perpetuate its ideal.(3)

So people can use this idiom to describe any of the following case:

 one will lose; it is impossible for that one to succeed; one has no chance to win; one should expect to lose; it will surely fail (4)

Note:

• Lost Cause is an idiom not a slang
• Use it for strong opinion
• It doesn't need a direct object

The links
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