Keep calm and carry on message on Great British union flag

The basic verb phrase carry on means “to continue” doing something, but here, it specifically means “to persevere” and is often associated a British “stiff upper lip.” According the UK’s official History of Government blog, the British Ministry of Information developed a series of three posters in 1939 to rally and reassure its populace as World War II ramped up. The third, and now iconic, poster flashed Keep Calm and Carry On in white, capital letters underneath an image of a crown on a bright, grabbingly red background. Who, exactly, coined the slogan is unclear. The other two posters featured equally comforting slogans: Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution; Will Bring Us Victory and Freedom is in Peril; Defend it with all Your Might. The British government printed nearly 2.5 million copies, reserving them to boost morale in case of a particularly bad German bombing. It never did display the posters, and most were recycled in 1940 during a wartime paper shortage. The Keep Calm and Carry On poster languished in number and obscurity until Stuart Manley discovered a copy in 2000 tucked away in a box of old books for his bookshop, Barter Books, in Alnwick, England. His wife and co-owner, Mary, framed and displayed the poster. Patrons fell in love with it, and the booksellers printed tens of thousands of copies over the decade. The poster skyrocketed in popularity after the 2008 recession, explained Foreign Affairs Correspondent Jon Henley in 2009 for The Guardian. Social psychologist Alain Samson observed for Henley that “[t]he words are also particularly positive, reassuring, in a period of uncertainty, anxiety, even perhaps of cynicism.” Since then, keep calm and carry on exploded as a meme. Everyone from crafters to tweeters have riffed on the slogan. Variations typically follow the template Keep Calm and X: Keep Calm and Drink Tea or Drink Beer, swapping out the crown icon for a teacup or pint glass