What is a flag?
It is an easy question. It is a piece of fabric, usually rectangular, somewhere in the scale of 18ins to 4 feet long so in the scale of Earth this is really tiny, and attached to the top of a pole. If it was just the fabric without the pole, and people ran around with them, it would not be called a flag. If the fabric rectangle was stuck up on a fence or a doorway, it would be called a banner. And if it was a long rectangle and carried by several people along a routeway, it would still be called a banner.
Still a flag is not just a piece of fabric on a pole. It has to have both those, but it is the fabric which defines what the flag is. Now the word can be used as in ‘flagging someone down’ when someone waves their arm at the side of the road, and the car stops. Or, ‘flagging it up,’ when we need to highlight something, pull it out and get it into focus, and usually means that there’s a problem, great or small, but in this way of usage it is something that needs flagging up, it needs some attention, through to need for fixing a problem before it becomes really apparent.
A flag, the object itself, is all about the fabric – not the fabric of linen, silk, cotton, though that is necessary because it isn’t possible to make a flag of wool, you don’t knit flags, but the reason for the flag. The flag is sending a message, stating facts, defining and demarcating, in about the most precise and specific way, which is why they are flags. Even more profound, the physical symbol of the flag – which is both pole and fabric – speaks its message either by a blank colour, like white or red, or by a vast array of different images and colour arrangements.
So, a flag is a micro of a macro, but as in all alignments and axes (plural of axis), there’s no pick ‘n’ mix, no mix and match, no one size fits all. Oh no. A flag is a micro of a clearly defined realm, and the entirety of that macro fits perfectly into the few feet of fabric on a pole.