THE WORLD CUP is when the whole of England decks itself out like a loyalist housing estate.
And even though the tournament has been over for a month now, the St. George’s Crosses still flutter in the breeze.
Maybe the supporters are leaving them up for next St. George’s Day.
The odd Union Jack is also still on show — and I’ve been upbraided before, right here in the column, about calling the British national flag the Union Jack — the correct name is the Union Flag.
But now it seems even the Oxford Dictionary has accepted that everyone calls it the Jack name, even if originally it meant “a small British union flag flown as the jack of a ship”.
Of course there are those in Ireland who still call it the Butcher’s Apron, and indeed, it seems the flying of so many Aprons during the proposed Queen’s visit to Ireland could be one of the main stumbling blocks to the whole Royal jaunt.
But we’ll leave that for another time, because I want to talk about the word jack. I’m amazed at its diverse meanings, from something you lift your car with to former Taoiseach Lynch. In the plural it can mean toilets, in the singular it runs from ‘the male of some species’ to ‘informal for jack all’.
In between it can mean an electrical connector, a lumberjack, or a steeplejack. But maybe, in these troubled times, it’s worth remembering the old saying, “Flags today; gas masks tomorrow.”
I have a Spanish friend who, although his English is good, often just gets expressions wrong.
He once said his hotel was “so and so,” and I knew just what he meant. I’ve stayed in hotels like that. But one day driving through Kilkeel on the occasion of the death of a loyalist leader, he noticed that the Union Jacks were all halfway down their flagpoles.
“Why are they halfassed?” he wanted to know. I had no answer.