How many Keep Calm and… posters, pictures, and memes have you seen in the last year? I can’t even begin to count how many I see on Pinterest and Instagram on a daily basis. However, for the first year or so that Keep Calm signs seemed to flood my Social Media screens, I had no idea where it came from. I researched the history, reading a number of resources including this.
I knew the original poster was from English during World War II, but I just recently learned that the Keep Calm and Carry On poster was the third in the series and was never actually used. The originals were found many years later (60!) at an auction. After multiple reproductions of the original gained popularity, it was only a matter of time before modern techies took the idea and morphed it into something funny and annoying and trivial and all over the Internet.
They even have a Keep Calm generator where you can create your own phrase and then purchase items with the phrase printed on them:
Keep Calm and Blog On
If I was a teacher in a classroom today, I would challenge my students to come up with creative Keep Calm sayings based on the content we were studying (after learning the origin of the idea!). Then I would see how they could share their creations with the world as part of a movement to have an impact.
But since I don’t have the opportunity, I will just Keep Calm and Blog On.
