hammer and sickle
3
8.0
- noun
:
martillo y hoz
- A red flag with a hammer and sickle flew over the entrance to the historic museum.
- hammer and sickle flag
- hammer and sickle banner
- Soviet hammer and sickle
Examples
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We see the hammer and sickle signs and the anti-capitalist slogans.
Blog text (19) -
One carried a sign with a slogan saying that Obama was a fascist, and also had a symbol of the hammer and sickle, as we all know and love from the flag of the Soviet Union.
Blog text (32) -
The Soviet Union's hammer and sickle symbolized it.
Blog text (21) -
A red Soviet flag hung from the left-hand wall, the gold hammer and sickle sewn onto a beautiful red field.
Fiction book (1996) -
On a deep red background were John Reed's name and class year, below an elegantly rendered, silvery Soviet hammer and sickle.
Academic text (2002) -
It featured an embossed hammer and sickle, stars and stripes, and two hands clasped in friendship.
Fiction book (1999) -
I mean, when I was out there, you know, you see literal communist Insignia, you see Che Guevara flags, hammer and sickle Insignia.
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The absence of partisan symbols like the hammer and sickle distinguishes it (along with most of the other newer murals) from its predecessors.
Academic text (1990) -
The crowd cheered as the hammer and sickle banner was raised during the commemorative parade.
-
In the museum, there is a display featuring the hammer and sickle as a symbol of the working class.
Surface Forms
Morphology
Although the constituents 'hammer' and 'sickle' are transparent as concrete objects, the established meaning ‘a symbol of communism/Soviet Union’ is a culturally specific, symbolic sense that cannot be derived from those words alone. A B1 learner who knows the individual words would likely interpret the phrase literally (two tools) and would need prior exposure to infer the political emblematic meaning, so the expression is opaque.
Etymology
Hammer and sickle was made after the Russian Revolution to show the coming together of city and country workers: the hammer stands for factory workers and the sickle for farm workers. That's why it came to mean 'communism' and was used on Soviet flags.