do duty

“As the secretary of state I’m not allowed to do politics,” he told the congregation, “but I can do duty, and it is everyone’s duty to be counted, to stand up and express your preference, the things that you want, and to go to the polling place and exercise that freedom that we have been given and that our officers and security teams will ensure that we have the opportunity to go vote.”

The 1918 influenza pandemic, which has been distilled in the public imagination to a single black-and-white image of bedridden US soldiers, has been hauled out of mothballs to do duty as a template of what we might expect from Covid-19.

Having reached Safeway with no fatalities, Stassin and I ordered our respective Loomos to trail us, so that they could do duty as shopping carts.

Can Chang do duty on The Times' editorial pages?

Second World War 'victory gardens' in Britain, for instance, saw everything from swathes of London's Hyde Park to railway embankments do duty as cropland.