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Raising the red flag

Then, somewhere in 2007 and 2008, many people stopped paying their mortgages. Housing prices collapsed. Mortgage banks went bust – because all they had left were bad deals and reclaimed houses that nobody wanted and therefore worthless.

In other words, the bubble burst.

Oops, I’m afraid we’re straying from the focal point of our discussion, and the focal point is the red flag, used metaphorically as a warning signal.

In many areas of industry and life in general, from past to the present, people use the red flag as a warning signal. In railway stations, for instance, we see, both in real life and in movies, people raising a green flag a lot. That’s a sign of all peace, no danger. When a red flag (or a red flashlight at night) is raised, however, train drivers know there’s something wrong and will stop the carriages immediately.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia online says: “The earliest citation for ‘red flag’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1602 and shows that at that time the flag was used by military forces to indicate that they were preparing for battle.”

“The earliest citation of ‘red flag’ in the sense of a warning”, it says, “is dated 1777 and refers to a flag warning of flood.”

Anyways, raising the red flag is a warning sign, signaling something is the matter and you’d better be careful. It is a metaphor, i.e. nobody is waving any real red flags, especially not any of those red flags as a symbol of socialism.