Several Eagles fans using Twitter during the Saints playoff game on Sunday found themselves surprised to be tweeting with a misspelled hashtag.
By halftime during the NFC divisional round matchup between Philadelphia and New Orleans, #FlyEagelsFly was trending nationally.
Nationwide interest of this level in the Eagles might be new, but the tag is not.
It’s been around since at least 2011, the earliest use Billy Penn could find. The creator is a stoner in “construction” who stopped tweeting five years ago and lived in California. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
What was happening right then? We can tell because professional sports records are meticulously kept: The Eagles had likely just scored their first TD in a game against the Dallas Cowboys that they’d go on to lose by one point.
Only 11 uses of the hashtag show up during that first year, but it exploded along with use of Twitter itself and has become commonly used, albeit inadvertently.
