Have an Ordinary Day

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Text on Button HAVE AN ORDINARY DAY
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Illustration of a yellow smiley face with no smile on a red background with yellow text above and below

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"Have an Ordinary Day” is a play on the phrase “Have a Nice Day” which is a colloquial expression when saying goodbye. It is often used in customer service in the USA with the consumer and the seller parting ways by telling each other to have a nice rest of their day. The first use of the phrase appeared in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in 1387. The phrase gained wider use in the 1920s and has continued on into present day.

The classic yellow smiley face is comprised of a yellow circle, two black dots for eyes, and a black arc ending in serifs for a mouth. It was designed in 1963 by commercial artist, Harvey Ross Ball. Ball was commissioned by The State Mutual Life Insurance Company to create a happy face to raise the morale of their employees. His version was created in 10 minutes. The design was printed onto more than 50 million buttons. Neither Ball nor the company copyrighted this smiley, so it was continually used by other businesses in their promotions.
The design and concept is quite simple and was definitely used before Ball’s 1963 version. However, his has become the most iconic. Variations have been used for advertising campaigns and in popular culture ever since.

In Internet culture, the neutral smiley face is often represented by the emoji :neutral face: (U+1F610) consisting of two eyes and a flat line for the mouth which expresses deadpan humor, a neutral stance, concern, and mild irritation.

Sources

About Harvey Ball. (n.d.). Retrieved September 12, 2020, from https://www.worldsmileday.com/index.php/article-index/item/380-about-ha…

Have a nice day. (n.d.) Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. (2015). Retrieved September 21 2020 from https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/have+a+nice+day

Have a nice day. (2020, August 31). Retrieved September 19, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_a_nice_day

Neutral Face Emoji. (n.d.). Retrieved September 24, 2020, from https://emojipedia.org/neutral-face/

Catalog ID SM0110