When the American flag is lowered to the mid-point of flagpoles to honor someone who died, should we call it half-mast or half-staff?
Our nation has specific ways it mourns whenever a former president dies. When the nation’s 39th president, Jimmy Carter, died at age 100 on Dec. 29, tributes immediately began pouring in. President Joe Biden that the American flag be lowered as a show of respect. Biden’s order states flags should be flown at half-staff for 30 days.
But President-Elect Donald Trump, however, then decided to complain about flags being flown at half-mast. He is particularly angry that flags will be lowered during his inauguration.
“The Democrats are all ‘giddy’ about our magnificent American Flag potentially being at ‘half mast’ during my Inauguration,” Trump said on his social platform Truth Social.
In what seems like an extraordinarily ironic line, Trump went on to say this:
They think it’s so great, and are so happy about it because, in actuality, they don’t love our Country, they only think about themselves.
If a Republican president died just before a Democrat was about to be sworn in, Republicans would lose their minds if a Democrat dared complain about the height of flags during the inauguration ceremony. (They’d have a valid reason to be upset, too.)
Honestly, I can’t imagine, with all of the problems we face as a nation, that anyone would be concerned about flags flying either at half-staff or half-mast out of respect to former president’s death. You show respect to the former commander-in-chief. That’s not unreasonable.
It isn’t disrespectful to the new president. The mourning for Carter and the inauguration of Trump are two important events just so that happen to be simultaneous.
Everything isn’t a conspiracy.
But beyond the “controversy” that shouldn’t be upsetting anyone, we do find an interesting question: Should we say the flags are flying at half-staff or half-mast?
Here’s the difference
The company Federal Flags has a write-up about the two terms on its website. The notion of lowering the flag out of respect had naval origins. A flag would be lowered on a ship’s mast, the long pole from which a sail is mounted, to make room for a hypothetical “ghost flag.”
In British English, that mast carried over whether you were talking about a flag mounted on a ship’s mast or a building’s staff. But that didn’t carry over to the U.S.:
American English observes a distinction between land and sea when it comes to flying flags in mourning. In the United States, therefore, flags flown on land are not flown from masts, but from staffs.
The Associated Press Stylebook verifies that in defining the preferred term for journalists and other organizations that follow AP Style.
“On ships and at naval stations ashore, flags are flown at half-mast,” the guide reads. “Elsewhere ashore, flags are flown at half-staff.”
Some consider the terms to be perfectly interchangeable. Unfortunately, many stylebooks do not.
Since the White House refers to the flag positioning as “half-staff” rather than “half-mast,” you’re better off following its lead.