Thing Not To Do Today: flag.

The builders told me not to bother to trying to strip the paint from the stairs. I'm not saying they were right, but that's a month of my life I'm not getting back.

Ah well, it's finished, now, but there's no denying that towards the end I was flagging a bit.

Now, the thing I want to know is, what's that sort of flagging, the sort that means daunted, fed-up, or discouraged, got to do with, well, flags? Flags are usually to do with striding out to take territory, or drawing attention to things:


This is the British Royal Standard, the Queen's personal flag.

I mean, if you fly the flag you're showing a patriotic love for your country; if you show the flag you're probably invading someone else's.

Flags are a symbol of active authority and communication. You flag down a car to make it stop; you flag up a passage of a book for further reference. 

Lowering a flag, conversely, is a sign of surrender - and in New Zealand to flag something away is to dismiss it as unimportant.

So what's the connection with the sort of flag that means to droop, or to lose strength, speed or enthusiasm?

This:

Thing Not To Do Today: flag. Annoyingly, the only definite provable connection between these two words seems to be is that they both appeared in the English language in the 1500s. 

Still, the word meaning to lose enthusiasm looks as if it comes from the Middle English flakken, to flap or flutter, from the Old Norse word flaka, to flicker or hang loose. This may also have suggested the name for the identifying cloth because of course they also have a habit of fluttering about. 

There are those who say that because flags are recftangular and flat there's just a chance they may alternatively be called after flagstones.

But I don't believe it.