A Peril of Pedantry

One of my pleasures is membership in the Dull Men’s Club.  This group has male and female members throughout the English-speaking world.  It is an online group with a website and a Facebook page.  The Facebook page is regularly loaded with witty and erudite comments posted by people trying to show that they not witty and erudite but indeed quite dull.  I spend about an hour each afternoon reading it.

Every now and then a pedant gets a word in.

About the word pedant.  It sounds like a tiny insect on a bicycle, but it’s not.  It’s too close for comfort in its nearness to pedophile or pederast.  And if you say we need people to watch out for the little things, I’d say you are dead right.  But it can be foolish to swat at mosquitoes while being stomped into the ground by elephants.

Anyway, a member of the Dull Men’s Club recently authored a Facebook post about the United Kingdom’s flag.  He called it the Union Jack.  A pedant came to arms and wrote, “the flag of the United Kingdom is actually only called the Union Jack when it is flown on the jack-staff on the bow of a Royal Naval ship. The correct name for the flag is the Union Flag.”

Now, you see, one of the guiding principles of pedantry is that it is incredibly easy to be wrong.  And here we are guided toward correctness by an organization in London, England—the Flag Institute.

As to what to call the UK’s flag, Union Jack or Union Flag, the Flag Institute says, “in 1902 an Admiralty Circular announced that Their Lordships had decided that either name could be used officially. Such use was given Parliamentary approval in 1908 when it was stated that “the Union Jack should be regarded as the National flag.”

So there.

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