Have we reached peak peak? The rise (and rise) of a ubiquitous phrase

This is an exhilarating time to be alive. All our efforts, all our resources, our consumption and tastes are maxing out in unison. Everything is hitting its peak.

After Australian researchers announced in April this year that the world had attained “peak beard”, a resource not supposed to be finite, other peaks followed. There were peak suburbs, peak hipsters, peak travel, peak narcissism and peak Beyoncé. There have been countless food peaks: banana, bacon, burgers, ramen, burrito and Freans (too many biscuits).

Some of the peaks are quite highbrow, such as peak punctuation (in The Atlantic). Other peaks are niche to the extent that it is hard to imagine enough people noticing any degree of proliferation, let alone plotting it on a graph. Did you know that we have reached peak house museum, peak car show or peak project management office? Sadly, we may also have reached peak longevity, which means that if you are reading this today you will die younger than if you were reading it yesterday. On the bright side, some say we have hit peak porn.

The obvious question is: have we reached peak peak? Given the parodies (such as “Kittens Reaching Peak Cuteness” on the Daily Mash website), we must be climbing Mount Peak’s upper slopes, at the very least. In which case the interesting question is: where did this phrase come from – and why did it gain such traction?

Peak beard? Photograph: Getty Images/Composite Rob Brooks is the Australian researcher who used the term “peak beard” back in April, triggering write-ups on news portals around the world and, eventually, when coverage had crested, the phrase “peak peak beard”. The Guardian’s report alone was shared 28,601 times on Facebook. But Brooks was not first to use the term peak beard. In 2013, the Guardian used the phrase in a story that was shared a humbler 926 times, which goes to show: you can peak too soon. In the late 16th century, peak beards – beards shaped like an isosceles triangle – had a moment. But nobody recalls those now. If they did, someone would have called peak peak peak beard: too many stories about the popularity of peak beards.

Not all peaks are bristle-related. Before beards there was “peak stuff”, the title of a 2011 research paper by the environmental writer Chris Goodall. He says he came up with the phrase because “the characteristic meme among environmentalists is that everything is getting worse all the time. I started to notice that this wasn’t the case. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that humankind’s impact on the environment in mature economies has peaked.” He cites “things such as the amount of waste we produce, the amount of fertiliser we throw on food, the weight of clothing we buy”.

Where else had he seen or heard the phrase “have we reached peak …”?

“I was hoping you were going to say that I was the first person to do this,” he says. But by 2011, other peaks had already cut through: “peak times” (Urban Dictionary, 2010), for instance, or plain “peak” (2009), meaning very good or very bad. Further back in time, the references fall away. Before 2009, the only peaks in Urban Dictionary were “very erect nipples”.

“Have we reached peak X?” belongs to a family of tropes known as snowclones – a templated phrase whose components offer tireless possibilities for adaptation and regeneration. Other examples are “X is the new Y”, “We are all X now” and “How I learned to stop X and love Y”.

Peak kitten? Photograph: GK & Vikki Hart/Getty Images The authority on Snowclones is the Language Log blog run by celebrated linguists Geoffrey Pullum and Mark Liberman. “This particular idiom is hard to track,” emails Liberman, “because ‘peak NOUN’ is a commonplace expression, with head nouns denoting things that are (or can be) measured, eg ‘peak performance’, ‘peak demand’, ‘peak power’.” In other words, the usage is too broad, and the adjective too common to be traced on databases. It would be impossible to separate comic formulations from more serious peaks.

There is some good news, though. Liberman remembers the first time he noticed the phrase. It was in 2008, when the US writer John Cole blogged that “we may have hit and passed Peak Wingnut”, a derogatory term for rightwingers.

Cole’s post is nearly six years old, but can he recall what inspired the phrase? “I came up with ‘peak wingnut’ because I was shocked,” Cole says. “The Republicans seemed to get crazier and crazier. The source of it is [US blogger] Kevin Drum. At the Washington Monthly, one of the things he was always talking about was peak oil.”

Peak hipster? Photograph: James Lange/PYMCA /REX This comes as news to Drum, who now writes for the web magazine Mother Jones. He was not the only person writing about peak oil, of course, but he was the one Cole read. “I’m very proud of that,” he says. “I had no idea that I had been so influential.”

Surely he must have noticed the catalogue of things said to be reaching their peak?

“Yes, I’ve noticed that it’s caught on,” he says. “My sense is that when you talk about peak wingnut or peak something else, you’re talking about people getting tired of something, a trend going on too long. If this came from peak oil, I guess it’s just a matter of the words seeming like they make sense without worrying about peak oil in a technical sense.”

Peak oil owes its origins to Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels, the essay that brought US geoscientist Marion King Hubbert to popular attention in 1956. In it, he argued that the rate of production of energy sources follows a bell-shaped curve. The curve rises from zero to a peak of maximum production, before tailing back to zero. But Hubbert himself did not use the phrase “peak oil” or “peak theory” in that 1956 paper. He wrote of “the ultimate peak of production” or “a culmination of world production” of energy sources. If we had gone straight from Hubbert to hipsters, we would not have had peak beard but “a culmination of beards”. Something else must have happened in between.

Ron Doel is a professor of history at Florida State University, specialising in the history of recent science. He interviewed Hubbert for 33 hours a few months before the geoscientist’s death in 1989 and plans to write his biography. Hubbert left his papers to the American Heritage Centre: “250 cartons of his materials,” says Doel. “What I haven’t found yet is when the term ‘peak oil’ may have appeared in his own correspondence.”

Peak oil? Photograph: Kay Nietfeld/ Kay Nietfeld/dpa/Corbis Doel is intrigued by Hubbert’s unexpected re-emergence in popular culture. He sends over a Google Ngram which appears to show that the phrase “peak oil” (as tracked in books and periodicals) mostly flatlines through the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Then, in the early 2000s, the thin blue line leaps upwards.

“See that line going up?” says Doel. “By about 2005, the frequency of the phrase ‘peak oil’ rises exponentially. I was surprised to see that. I was aware that peak oil was much in discussion, but I wouldn’t have thought it was that much more in discussion than in prior years.” A search of the archive of the New York Times for stories on peak oil logs one piece from 1980, then none until February 2004, since when there have been a further 275. There has been an accompanying rise in peak oil literature.

The next day, Doel emails to say that he mentioned our conversation to a few of his grad students. “All of them saw a connection between peak oil and the US Iraqi invasion.”

Peak ramen? Photograph: Masahiro Makino/Getty Images/Flickr RF Of course, “Have we reached peak X, Y or Z?” works as a joke because the nouns it plays with have nothing to do with peak oil. They are often renewable items – you can always grow another beard, cook another bowl of ramen. But the distance between the two intentions – of peak oil, and “have we reached peak X?” – is much smaller than it may first appear. The joke became popular only because peak oil became interesting again. It sprang out of the phrase, and the phrase sprang out of global concern, bubbling up out of a collective insecurity about finite energy sources and environmental responsibility, and about the repercussions of western foreign policies.

There is something fatiguing about the idea that so many things, in a few short years, have reached maximum intensity, influence or wonder. Beer, chicken, road signs … It doesn’t really matter what the nouns are. The cumulative effect of all those peaks feels a little mournful. “Peak” can mean brilliant, the best of everything – but also that it will never again be this good.

“One thing that is probably similar in both our countries,” says Doel, “is that the expectation that the next generation is going to do better than we ourselves have done is so fragile at this point, so uncertain.”

Goodall, by now adjusted to the idea that he did not invent the “peak X” snowclone, is thinking about why it caught the imagination. “Ten years ago, we had a sort of expectation that growth would continue. Economic, population, standard of living … Since 2007, the beginning of the financial crisis, that assumption has drifted away in western economies. I think there is something going on about the adjustment of expectations, the understanding that nothing ever grows for long,” he says.

“I’m in my middle years. My children have the expectation that they won’t be as rich as me. They won’t have the life chances, they won’t have the disposable income. There is an underlying sense that what has gone on might be a secular, long-term change.”

After a peak, there is only one way to go.

“Too true,” emails Liberman. “But the people who write about ‘peak wingnut’ and ‘peak hipster’, among others, are generally hopeful that the future might bring relief from a trend that they deplore.”

As Liberman says, sometimes down is up.