The History of "Calm Down"

How do you hold on to your priorities when others are telling you to shut up?

Has telling someone to calm down ever worked?

“That’s a poisonous snake, Eve.” “Calm down, Adam. He likes me.”

“That’s a lot of rain.” “Calm down, Noah. It’ll end some time.”

“Pharoh, the Nile is full of jumping frogs!” “Calm down, they look cute.”

I remember riding in the car with my grandfather as a teenager and he made us listen to classical music. When the DJ announced that one of the songs was written in the 1600s, I couldn’t take it anymore. “The 1600s? Mo-o-om! That is over two hundred years old! No, three hundred!” My mother would have been right to tell me to calm down. She did change the radio station, though.

Alternatively, when a young woman on Good Morning, Britain defended activists blocking coal production with their bodies. “Forty percent of Earth will not be habitable by humans,” she noted. The rest of the morning crew told her all the reasons that getting your groceries was more important. They didn’t say it in so many words, but really they were saying ‘calm …