There are all kinds of words and phrases – soundbites, lines from songs, advertising slogans, funny quotations, condensed opinions and political messages – that become part of our popular heritage in thousands of homes and on thousands of websites. There are statements and expressions that are greeted by huge numbers of people with anything from loud laughter to the deepest gratitude, and occasionally so many people are familiar with these that they become a sign of the times, a phenomenon. These meaningful, meaningless, trendy or magical messages are usually repeated to everyone who wants to listen to them – but sometimes to quite a lot of people who don’t want to as well.

Suddenly, there they are. Sometimes they end up on everyone’s lips in an incredibly short time before then disappearing in the veil of forgetfulness after a fairly short period. Other times we can never get rid of them, they form part of childhood, youth or the present day for millions of people, or else they end up actually becoming part of the language.

"Keep it simple, stupid"

When Archimedes (legend has it he was sitting in the bath when he discovered what we now call Archimedes’ principle) cried Eureka!, “I found it” back in 200 BC, he created an expression that people all over the world still use today, more than 2000 years later. Who says what, and the context in which it’s said, are often the things that add value to these expressions. When the gilded Donald Trump stole the brilliant “Making America Great Again”, he wasn’t even the first person to steal it – but there’s no doubt he’ll be the one remembered for saying it.

Which phrases have moved you?

Some phrases shine out like beacons when they’re said. When John F. Kennedy stood there in West Berlin in 1963, a couple of years after the Berlin Wall was built, and talked about communism on the other side by saying “Ich bin ein Berliner”, this had a huge amount of symbolic value. When Ronald Reagan stood next to the wall in that same city a couple of years before it came down and said “Tear down this wall” to Gorbachev, the words carried a great deal of weight then as well. Whether Reagan’s encouragement influence the peace process to any appreciable extent is uncertain, but his words remain. These two phrases are more or less the only thing people remember nowadays from two famous and pretty important speeches. The same is true for the emotional 17-minute speech, “I have a dream”, given by Martin Luther King Jr. in front of more than 200,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1968. Many, many people remember just this one phrase, but countless strong emotions and thoughts are attached to it as well. The words “I have a dream” takes the dream that citizens of colour have, to break away from all the links with slavery and become equal with white people, and compresses it down into four words. These words would be simple and pedestrian in any other context.

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What sentences have moved you?

Which soundbites and phrases do you remember best when you think back? Which song titles create associations or make you remember things? Which book titles or phrases from books awaken something in you? What do you remember from the things you learned – or ought to have learned – at school? What political statements have stuck in your memory? What advertising campaigns rapidly rise to the surface when you stop for a moment and think about it? Here are a few words and expressions that have meant a lot to many things. It was impossible to avoid some of them, while others fared best in specific environments or groups. Some of them have lived on, some were more flashes in the pan. See which ones you remember, and what you associate with them. We’ll explain them in brief a little later on.

Veni, vidi, vici
Keep Calm & Carry on
Keep it simple, stupid
Flower Power
That's one small step for (a) Man, one giant leap for mankind.
Go ahead, make my day!
Relax, do not do it…
Just do it
I'm a Looser Baby, so why do not you kill me
Think Different
What if God was one of us
Wazzup?
Do not kill my vibe

Power flower (sic)

Viral linguistic flowers bloom relatively seldom, and they usually disappear as soon as you try to press them between the pages of a book. They arise due to contemporary phenomena, they’re often said by people you already have a relationship with, they tap into a nerve that’s pretty well hidden in amongst all the media noise. The new digital and social media mean that the ways in which more or less ingenious combinations of words and images can spread suddenly throughout the world have changed forever. If it was difficult before to guess what the Next Big Thing would be, it’s completely impossible now because nowadays things can spread from some kid’s room to the entire world in a flash. If not faster. Some of those viral world sensations disappear just as quickly as they appeared, while others become part of our shared global platform.

What does the fox say?

Take an expression like What Does The Fox Say?, a comedy song by the Norwegian Ylvis brothers. They came up with the stupid yet brilliant idea that people know what cows, pigs and frogs say, but nobody knows what the fox says. This easily recognisable phrase, combined with a funny video and a catchy tune wheeled out by the golden boys in Stargate became a YouTube phenomenon, resulting in around 1 billion views overall. Just show me one person who reckons they knew right from the outset how big this phenomenon would be, and I’ll show you an expert in post-event rationalisation.

Is it?

One company that’s always tried – and frequently managed – to tap into a shared global conceptual framework is the Coca-Cola Company. They’ve always worked hard to reflect contemporary life. This can give us a certain idea of how things have changed over a period of a hundred and thirty years and show us how little things actually change, in spite of everything. The sample slogans below have been taken from the American market.

1886 - Drink Coca-Cola
1904 - Delicious and Refreshing
1905 - Coca-Cola Revives and Sustains
1906 - The Great National Temperance Beverage
1917 - Three Million a Day
1922 - Thirst Knows No Season
1923 - Enjoy Thirst
1924 - Refresh Yourself
1925 - Six Million a Day
1926 - It Had to Be Good to Get Where It Is
1927 - Pure as Sunlight
1927 - Around the Corner from Everywhere
1929 - The Pause that Refreshes
1932 - Ice Cold Sunshine
1938 - The Best Friend Thirst Ever Had
1939 - Thirst Asks Nothing More
1939 - Whoever You Are, Whatever You Do, Wherever You May Be, When You Think of Refreshment Think of Ice Cold Coca-Cola
1942 - The Only Thing Like Coca-Cola is Coca-Cola Itself
1948 - Where There's Coke There's Hospitality
1949 - Along the Highway to Anywhere
1952 - What You Want is a Coke
1956 - Coca-Cola ... Makes Good Things Taste Better
1957 - Sign of Good Taste
1958 - The Cold, Crisp Taste of Coke
1959 - Be Really Refreshed
1963 - Things Go Better with Coke
1969 - It's the Real Thing
1971 - I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke (part of the "It's the Real Thing" campaign)
1976 - Coke Adds Life
1979 - Have a Coke and a Smile
1982 - Coke Is It!
1985 - We've Got a Taste for You
1985 - America's Real Choice
1986 - Red, White & You
1986 - Catch the Wave
1987 - When Coca-Cola is a Part of Your Life, You Can't Beat the Feeling
1988 - You Can't Beat the Feeling
1989 - Official Soft Drink of Summer
1990 - You Can't Beat the Real Thing
1993 - Always Coca-Cola
2000 - Coca-Cola. Enjoy
2001 - Life Tastes Good
2003 - Coca-Cola ... Real
2005 - Make It Real
2006 - The Coke Side of Life
2009 - Open Happiness

2016 - Taste the Feeling

*The Coca Cola list is on loan from s6studies.com

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Who said what and when?

Veni, vidi, vici. I came, I saw, I conquered. Said by Julius Caesar. (47 BC)

Keep Calm and Carry on. A poster created by the British government to prepare and motivate people ahead of the Second World War. Thousands of versions of this poster have been created since then. (1939)

Keep it simple, stupid. Also abbreviated KISS. Originally a message from the US Navy encouraging people to keep things as simple as possible. (1960)

Flower Power. A peace-loving, non-violent slogan from the 1960s and 1970s, emerging from the pen of Irwin Allen Ginsberg (1965).

That’s one small step for (a) Man, one giant leap for mankind. Said by Neil Armstrong when he was the very first person in history to walk on the moon. (1969)

Go ahead, make my day! Dirty Harry, played by Clint Eastwood (1983)

Relax, don’t do it. Song by Frankie goes to Hollywood (1984)

Just do it. Slogan for Nike (1988)

I’m a Loser Baby, so why don’t you kill me. Taken from Beck’s song Loser (1992)

Think Different. Apple slogan that linked the company with great people such as Muhammed Ali, Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi (1997)

What if God was one of us. The song One of us was sung by Joan Osborne, and according to Wikipedia it was written in record time by Eric Bazilian from The Hooters to impress a girl. It must have worked, because now they’re married and have two children.

Wazzup? This question from a Budweiser advertising campaign has probably been bellowed a few million times too many at parties all over the world. (1999)

Don’t kill my vibe. This contemporary message, along with a very catchy tune, helped to launch unknown Norwegian artiste Sigrid in the international music arena, where she’s received rave reviews from Sir Elton John and others.