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'Nobody wants to see this!' Trump vents fury over flags being half-staff for inauguration
(www.rawstory.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
170 points (98.3% liked)
United States | News & Politics
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And "half-mast" is a term only used on ships (that is, things that have masts). On land, where we have flagstaffs (a.k.a. flagpoles), the correct term is "half-staff".
To follow-up on another reply to you the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) first encounters the phrase as you mention it in 1588 but acknowledges that it later spread to incorporate buildings; and can still be used in both respects now.
In America.
Edit: it looks like it's time to school some Americans on English, a particularly easy task.
Let's start with the definition from the Merriam-Webster dictionary, descendant of arguably the definitive American dictionary, certainly one of the first, created by Noah Webster.
Now, from the American Heritage dictionary.
Going farther field, from the Cambridge dictionary.
Note that both the Merriam-Webster and Cambridge dictionaries list half-mast as related phrases.
Using a dictionary to prove two words are similar is not relevant here. The American terminology is half-staff not half-mast.
If you had done even some basic research on American flag ceremony and the terminology we use, you wouldn't be so confidently incorrect on the subject.
This is an article about two presidents of the United States.
Yes, but the guy being quoted, for all his faults, has done more travelling than the average person, and clearly has picked up some phrases that are more common elsewhere. Not that that really matters, since referring to a flag pole as a mast is still considered acceptable by every dictionary I bothered to check, even the American ones (which I noted in the edit to my previous post).