![]() “It has jumped the shark,” said Gutfreund. That number dropped to 14,577 posts in 2014. Between 20, the hashtag has been used in over 108,586 posts out of which 47,340 posts were from 2013. A survey of the use of the hashtag #keepcalmandcarryon hashtag on Twitter between September 2010 and present day by social analytics firm Crimson Hexagon, as shown in the chart below, shows that the volume has dwindled after peaking in 2013. More recently, the phenomenon seems to be waning. “You can put anything in it, and it goes.” “It’s just a simple design that can be used in a lot of different ways,” said Fernanda Suarez, social media manager at Huge. The original typeface by the British Ministry of Information was designed to be hard for the Germans to counterfeit it. The slogan’s classic design has also contributed to its appeal. It helped that it could be easily personalized. In the 2000s, America’s global war on terror had begun, to be followed by the recession, which helped the slogan take off and develop a life of its own, said Christian Hughes, principal and president at agency Cutwater. Retailer Juicy Couture came up with “Keep Calm and Choose Juicy” a few years ago, while Major League Baseball promoted inter-team rivalry by selling sports merchandise such as “Keep Calm and Beat the Red Sox.” E-retailers like Amazon and Etsy have thousands of products with various versions of the slogan. Brands haven’t hesitated to incorporate it over the years. There’s “Keep Calm and Have a Cupcake” merchandise for sweets lovers and “Keep Calm and Kill Zombies” for wannabe zombie slayers. It has also spawned remixes and parodies, in part because brands have come up with their own versions and in part because one U.K.-based company has trademarked the phrase across the European Union and the U.S.Įither way, there seems to be a version for everyone. Since then, it has become a global cultural meme, plastered on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs to cuff links. “Keep Calm and Carry On” was discovered in 2000 on an abandoned propaganda poster from the Second World War in a second-hand bookshop in England. From there, it’s a short step to the self-mocking “Run Out of Ideas and Make a Parody” and the meta-self-mockingly abstract “ Meme Meme and Memey Meme.Universal Pictures isn’t alone. Like her, I’m amused by the evolution from simple transpositions like “Keep Calm and Rock On” to “Drink Lots and Pass Out” to more ironic assertions like “Change Words and Be Hilarious”. ![]() She’s a biologist, so as you might expect, she’s built a nice phylogenetic tree. Via BlogLESS I came across Christina Agapakis’s Meme Tree. Its nostalgic evocation of the steady resolve of bygone days has mated with its easily mocked earnestness to breed a deranged litter of spin-offs. Originally created in 1939 to steel the British public to the stresses of the coming war with Germany, it was rediscovered in 2000 and has been a gold mine of merchandising and parody ever since. It’s hard to say, for instance, why the Lazy Sunday video inspired so many spin-offs, but YouTube tells me there are 278 as of this writing.Īcross the Pond, the Keep Calm and Carry On poster hits all the right notes to make it a cultural phenomenon in the UK. You know you’ve struck a cultural nerve when you inspire not just one but dozens of parodies and copycats. ![]()
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