Saturday, June 28, 2008

Flag waving.

With Andy Murray - at the time of writing - still in Wimbledon, there have been a fair few flags of St. Andrew visible in the crowds. A commentator who perhaps should have known better, referred to one such as "the saltire", and that's a name commonly used by the Scots. But a saltire is just a type of heraldic design - simply a diagonal cross, so the Scottish flag is a saltire, but as that design is also used by other countries and states, it has no particular right to call itself the saltire, although it's true that it's almost certainly the oldest flag of that type.

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