crisis actor

5 September 2025

The term crisis actor originated in the emergency preparedness community and originally referred to professional actors available for hire to participate in disaster and mass casualty drills as victims, witnesses, criminals, etc. Hiring trained actors is thought to increase the realism and effectiveness of such drills. But after the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, the term took a darker, conspiratorial turn.

The earliest citation for the phrase that I have found is from the blog Crisisactors.org from 31 October 2012. This blog is no longer available on the internet (except via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine) for reasons that will become obvious. The blog post in question opens: 

Active Shooter Crisis Actors Target Mall Shootings via Visionbox

DENVER, CO, October 31, 2012 — A new group of actors is now available nationwide for active shooter drills and mall shooting full-scale exercises, announced Visionbox, Denver’s leading professional actors studio.

Visionbox Crisis Actors are trained in criminal and victim behavior, and bring intense realism to simulated mass casualty incidents in public places.

After the 14 December 2012 mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which twenty children, aged six and seven, and six adult staff members were murdered, crisis actor took on a more sinister meaning. Conspiracy theorists began claiming that the shooting was staged, and that the family members of the dead children who appeared on television advocating for gun control were actually “crisis actors.”

Use of this conspiratorial sense of crisis actor was popularized by Alex Jones and his InfoWars fake news website. On 22 December 2012, just over a week after the shooting, Jones, using the Twitter handle @planetInfowars, tweeted “Active shooter crisis actors target malls,” a paraphrase of the Crisisactors.org headline from the previous October. When read in the context of Jones’s other work, it is clear that he was using the tweet to promote the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook shooting never happened and that the victims were just “crisis actors.”

Other conspiracy theorists picked up on Jones’s deranged ramblings and amplified his message. On 8 January 2013, the McClatchy news service reported on one such conspiracy theorist, one who, on paper at least, had credentials:

A communication professor known for conspiracy theories has stirred controversy at Florida Atlantic University with claims that last month's Newtown, Conn., school shootings did not happen as reported—or may not have happened at all.

Moreover, James Tracy asserts in radio interviews and on his memoryholeblog.com. that trained “crisis actors” may have been employed by the Obama administration in an effort to shape public opinion in favor of the event's true purpose: gun control.

The article is referencing a 1 January 2013 (revised on 4 January) blog post by Tracy that repeats the idea that the victims and their families are crisis actors and mentions Visionbox as a possible source for such actors.

A hint of the damage the conspiracy theory did can be seen in a 16 January 2013 article in the Christian Science Monitor. The article quotes Gene Rosen, who lived near the school and had given aid to several students on the day of the shooting, about the harassment he received by people who believed he was paid to give false accounts to the media:

“I don’t know what to do,” Rosen, a retired psychologist, told Salon. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting e-mails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘How much am I being paid?’”

In 2022, Jones was ordered to pay over $1.4 billion in damages to plaintiffs in a defamation lawsuit brought by victims of the shooting and their families. He lost control of his InfoWars media outlet and brand.

So the history of crisis actor is that of twisting a term denoting a useful function, that of performers who portray people in disaster situations in order to train first responders, to one designating participants in a fictional conspiracy.

There is an older, unremarkable sense of crisis actor that is unrelated to the above. It comes from the world of political science, where it refers to a decision-maker in an international crisis. This sense dates to at least 1968, when it appears in the Proceedings of the International Peace Research Association Second Conference:

McClelland argues that performance characteristics of crisis actors, both in crisis and non-crisis behavior, can be identified, and that phase characteristics of particular crises and of crises in general as one type of international behavior, can be distinguished.

While this sense is etymologically unrelated to the other, one cannot help but think its use has been skunked by the conspiracy theorists.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

@planetInfowars. Twitter.com (now X.com), 22 December 2012.

“Active Shooter Crisis Actors Target Mall Shootings via Visionbox.” Crisisactors.org. 31 October 2012. Archive.org.

Clary, Mike. “FAU Prof Stirs Controversy by Disputing Newtown Massacre.” McClatchy—Tribune Business News, 8 January 2013. ProQuest Wire Feed.

Edwins, Laura. “Sandy Hook ‘Truthers’ Harass Newtown Man, Conspiracy Theories Go Viral.” Christian Science Monitor, 16 January 2013, 7. ProQuest Newspapers.

Minix, Dean Alan. The Role of the Small Group in Foreign Policy Decision-Making: A Potential Pathology in Crisis Decisions? PhD dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1979.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2022, s.v. crisis actor, n.

Smoker, Paul. “A Time Series Analysis of Sino-Indian Relations.” In Proceedings of the International Peace Research Association Second Conference, vol. 1. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1968, 250–74 at 254. Archive.org.

Tracy, James. “Sandy Hook Massacre Part II.” Memoryholeblog.com, 1 January 2013 (revised 4 January 2013). Archive.org.

Bechdel test

“The Rule” by Alison Bechdel, 1985 comic that appeared in the strip Dykes to Watch Out For

3 September 2025

The Bechdel test is an informal way to determine whether a film or TV show exhibits bias against women in the female characters it presents. It’s named for its inventor, cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who described the test in a 1985 installment of her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It is sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace test, including Bechdel’s friend Liz Wallace, whom Bechdel credits with the idea. And in early use the test was sometimes labeled with the misnomer the Mo Movie Measure, after Mo, a character in Bechdel’s strip. That’s a misnomer because Mo didn’t appear in the strip until 1987. The test is in three parts:

1. Does the film have at least two significant (e.g., named) female characters?

2. Do the women talk to one another?

3. Is the topic of their conversation something other than a man?

If the answers to all three questions are “yes,” then the movie passes the test.

It took some twenty years for the name Bechdel test to appear and for the concept to enter into the cultural consciousness. Bechdel test first appears in a 16 August 2005 comment to a post on Bechdel’s blog. The blog text reads:

Julie from Portland, OR, kindly emailed us to let us know that lefty blogs like Pandagon have been discussing the Mo Movie Measure a film-going concept that originated in an early DTWOF strip, circa 1985. We were excited to hear that someone still remembers this 20-year-old chestnut.

But alas, the principle is misnamed. It appears in "The Rule," a strip found on page 22 of the original DTWOF collection. Mo actually doesn't appear in DTWOF until two years later. Her first strip can be found half-way through More DTWOF. Alison would also like to add that she can't claim credit for the actual “rule.” She stole it from a friend, Liz Wallace, whose name is on the marquee in the comic strip, reprinted below.

Then, _swallow, a commenter on that blog post, gave the test its name:

I took the meme to college, where my friends now say, “That movie didn’t pass the Alison Bechdel test.” I guess we should change the name....

The term was soon appearing in print. From Amanda Marcotte’s 2007 book It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments:

The rule is in turns called the Bechdel Test or the Mo Movie Measure, after the comic strip artist Alison Bechdel and her most famous comic creation. The idea is that a movie’s baseline measure to get it past the teeth-grindingly sexist phase is to have two female characters who have at least one conversation with each other that’s not about men. The Golden Girls isn’t a movie, but it passes the Mo Movie Measure with flying colors. The characters on the show talk about men to each other, sure, but they talk about everything else under the sun.

The Bechdel test isn’t a measure of a movie’s quality—Star Wars, Casablanca, and The Godfather all fail the test. Nor is a lack of female roles in any one film necessarily a bad thing—for example, there really is no way to work significant female characters into a movie like Saving Private Ryan. But the test is useful when applied to movies in general to point out how the industry as a whole exhibits a high degree of sexism and the lack of opportunity for female actors.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Bechdel, Alison. “The Rule” (comic). Dykes to Watch Out For. Ithaca, New York: Firebrand, 1986, 22–23. Archive.org.

Marcotte, Amanda. It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. Berkeley, California: Seal Press, 2007, 215. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2018, s.v. Bechdel test, n.

Resmer, Cathy. “The Rule.” Dykes to Watch Out For (blog), 16 August 2005. Archive.org.

Image credit: Alison Bechdel, 1985. Fair use of a low-resolution copy to illustrate the topic under discussion.

yodel

Drake’s Yodel snack cakes, a commercial variant of the Swiss roll cake

1 September 2025

Yodeling is associated with the Swiss Alps, so it’s no surprise that the English word is borrowed from German. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb to yodel as “to sing or call using a distinctive style of vocalization characterized by repeated rapid alternations of pitch between the low chest voice and the high falsetto or head voice.” The German jodeln dates to at least the eighteenth century, and the form jodln in Swiss/Austrian dialect is undoubtedly older still. In Middle High German the word was jölen (to sing loudly and wildly), with jö being an interjection akin to the English yo.

The word starts appearing in English in the first half of the nineteenth century. The earliest citation of the noun yodeling in the Oxford English Dictionary Online is from an 18 August 1827 journal entry by Irish diarist Martha Wilmot:

The Archduke quitted the town to the wild yodling of two young girls, who suddenly begun [sic] to sing their mountain melody, and we all followed, after spending one of the most original and amusing days possible.

The English appearance of the verb can be traced to a 4 September 1838 letter by Harriet Countess Granville (Harriet Leveson-Gower) written from Bern, Switzerland:

I wish you to imagine me coming down a steep rocky path, fit only for goats, in a chair carried by two men, quite at my ease, looking at a glacier or a snow mountain, or a cascade, or a châlet, listening to three little peasant girls, all youdling to perfection in parts; dining in clean, excellent inns, looking upon all these glories, sunsets, full moon.

A century later, yodeling would become a feature of American country music. This tradition was introduced by Jimmie Rodgers who from 1927–33 recorded a series of songs titled Blue Yodel.

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Sources:

Leveson-Gower, Harriet (Countess Granville). Letter, 4 September 1838. Letters of Harriet Countess Granville, vol. 2 of 2. London: Longmans, Green, 1894, 266. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2016, s.v. yodel, v., yodel, n., yodelling, n.

Wilmot, Martha. Journal entry, 18 August 1827. More Letters from Martha Wilmot Impressions of Vienna 1819–1829. Edith Chaplin, Marchioness of Londonderry and H. M. Hyde, eds. London: Macmillan, 1935, 288.

Photo credit: Evan-Amos, 2012. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

white shoe

Senator James Hamilton Lewis and Joseph P. Tumulty, secretary to President Wilson, 1917

29 August 2025

The adjective white shoe is used in the United States to denote the establishment, the privileged, moneyed, and usually conservative, elites who traditionally run American businesses. And in current use it is often specifically used to denote top-flight law firms. But why white shoes? The term dates to the 1930s when it was fashionable among students at Ivy League schools to wear shoes made of white leather, so-called white bucks. The term moved out of collegiate slang into mainstream discourse in the 1950s.

A so-called guide to fraternities at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill that was published in the April 1932 issue of the humor magazine The Carolina Buccaneer establishes white shoes as a fashion trend among the collegiate set, although the article implies that the fraternity in question is a bunch of wannabes rather than the elite social set:

Delta Psi. Tony’s Place—the white shoe boys that wear flannels and brown coats the year round. They spend most of their week-ends in Philadelphia and points north. A very quiet house during Christmas and Spring vacations. The lodge has made progress in the past few years and will probably go in debt enough in the next few years to change it from the small time crowd that it now has into a good bunch of heavy taxpayers.

The following, which appeared in the Columbia Daily Spectator on 21 November 1933, places the white-shoe fashion trend in the Ivy League:

Bootblack Decries White Shoe Style

Lincoln, the bootblack who spends his days on 116th Street opposite the Hamilton Hall entrance to the Van Am Quad, is on the verge of writing a letter to General Johnson to see what NRA can do about white shoes on the Campus.

“White shoes,” he declared yesterday, “are all right in the summertime when I can make an honest living keeping them white. But the government should prevent young fellows from making fools of themselves by wearing them dirty all winter and ruining a man's honest business. If the College won't do anything about it, I'll write to Washington.”

The earliest use of the figurative sense of white shoe that I’ve found is from the Chicago Daily Tribune of 28 December 1933:

“I can see,” he said, “that Pearson and Davenport colleges at Yale are going to become the fashionable colleges of the United States as Christchurch [sic] is the fashionable college at Oxford. The ‘white shoe boys of Park avenue’ already have taken up these two colleges and managed to impart an air of social distinction to their walls.[”]

And again from the Columbia Daily Spectator, this time from 25 April 1934, we get a humorous take on the white-shoe fad among Ivy League students:

ITS HERE! THE MONSTER CAMPAIGN CALCULATED TO RID. THE CAMPUS OF THE GREATEST NUISANCE SINCE CLASSES WERE INVENTED. THE WHITE SHOE HAS COME TO GO!

Once an innocent jest, the white shoe has come to stain. Originally the footwear of hospital internes and street cleaners, its sanctity has been invaded by the college student, who jumps into anything feet first. Wherever primitive savagery has flourished in all its pristine simplicity the white foot has always come to trample. Furthermore, from the earliest days of Rome unto the present time, the white shoe has been a symbol of disintegrating masculinity. Are we disintegrating, boys? NO!

[…]

The following is the procedure to be followed in stamping out the white shoe aristocracy.

The article goes on to advocate stepping on and scuffing up fellow students’ white shoes.

Not to be outdone by Columbia in the humor department, the Daily Princetonian of 25 November 1941 had this literal-but-with-class-implications use of white shoe:

According to their sociologist-representative Dr. O. K. (Vienna) Hackenablemish, N. Y. N. H. & H., Princeton lends itself unusually well to a simultaneous cultural and institutional analysis. (Yes!) Six aspects of Tiger culture become apparent from the first.

First is the material culture, or Artifacts, as it is so familiarly known. Of course, you've heard of that. You know, the old “Show me a white shoe (five-button-coat, station-wagon, crewcut, beer-jacket, etc., etc.) and I'll show you a Princeton man” kind of stuff.

The OED Online’s earliest citation is from the Princeton Alumni Weekly of 21 November 1947. This passage uses white-shoe boys as a synonym for Princeton undergrads and also shows that the employment of precariat faculty is nothing new:

The white-shoe boys will get their course selections in on time from now on or else, according to a recent ruling by the Board of Trustees. Or else they will part with $20 vacillation fee. The old charge for changing courses in midstream was a modest $5, and it was not considered that this amount covered the hiring-and-firing expenses occasioned by post-deadline switches. These amounted to 840 at the beginning of the term, a number large enough to wreak havoc with long-range precept plans.

This 7 August 1951 advertisement for Nieman-Marcus in the Dallas Morning News, offering fashion advice, gives some explanation for the term and opines that the social distinction does not carry over into life after graduation:

Social lines are faint and easily broken. During our school days, we used to hear the terms, “white shoe” and “black shoe.”  The white shoe boy was the one from the right kind of family, with the right kind of money, wearing the right kind of clothes and joining the right kind of clubs or fraternities. The black shoe boy was the hick, the yokel. In later years, however, we found that the terms were pretty meaningless. A lot white shoe boys we used to know work for black shoe boys, these days, and are very happy when the boss take them to his club for dinner.

A pair of articles in the September 1953 issue of Esquire use the term. One by Russell Lynes, “How Shoe Can You Get,” details the collegiate slang at Yale:

At Yale there is a system for pigeonholing the members of the college community which is based on the word “shoe.” Shoe bears some relation to the word chic, and when you say that a fellow is “terribly shoe” you mean that he is a crumb in the upper social crust of the college, though a more kindly metaphor might occur to you. You talk of a “shoe” fraternity or a “shoe” crowd, for example, but you can also describe a man’s manner of dress as “shoe.” The term derives, as you probably know, from the dirty white bucks which are the standard collegiate footwear (you can buy new ones already dirty in downtown New York to save you the embarrassment of looking as though you hadn’t had them all your life), but the system of pigeonholing by footwear does not stop there. It encompasses the entire community under the terms White Shoe, Brown Shoe, and Black Shoe.

White Shoe applies primarily to the socially ambitious and the socially smug types who affect a good deal of worldly sophistication, run, ride and drink in rather small cliques, and look in on the second halves of football games when the weather is good. They try so hard not to be collegiate in the rah-rah (or, as they would say, “Midwestern”) sense of the term that they are probably the most “collegiate” types now in college.

And this one by Martin Mayer on Harvard makes the elitist claim that Harvard, by admitting large number of scholarship students, can no longer be considered white shoe:

The ten thousand students who with varying degrees of assistance educate themselves at Harvard come from every part of the United States and literally dozens of foreign countries, in all shapes, sizes, colors and religions. Harvard is not today a society school; it isn’t even white-shoe.

Today, white shoe is probably most often used in reference to high-powered law firms, whose associates and partners come out of elite law schools. There is this description of then-newly appointed Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II in the 25 September 1955 Trenton Sunday Times that uses the term in the specific legal context:

Indeed he is a new breed of cat on the Court. Though born in Chicago, he is a Princeton-to-Oxford-to-Wall Street product—the Court’s first Ivy League “white-shoe” boy, its first Rhodes scholar, its first full-fledged eastern Dewey Republican.

And for an example of more recent vintage, there is this from the New Yorker of 5 May 2025:

Executive orders such as the ones titled “Addressing Risks from Paul Weiss” and “Addressing Risks from Jenner & Block” are self-evidently cudgels for Trump to wield against his enemies—in this case white-shoe lawyers who have worked for his political opposition.

White bucks may have gone out of fashion, but the term they spawned lives on.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Thanks to Fred Shapiro for pointing out some of the early uses to me.

A Bared Manual of Carolina Fraternities.” Carolina Buccaneer, April 1932, 8/2. Archive.org.

“Bootblack Decries White Shoe Style.” Columbia Daily Spectator (New York City), 21 November 1933, 1/5. Columbia Spectator Archive.

Gibbs, C. McCague. “Yale ‘News’ Sends Dr. Hackenablemish to Analyze Johnny-Come-Lately Culture.” Daily Princetonian (New Jersey), 25 November 1941, 1/2. Papers of Princeton.

Heimann, Robert K. “On the Campus.” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 12 November 1947, 8/3.

“High Court.” Trenton Sunday Times-Advertiser (New Jersey), 25 September 1955, Part 4, 14/6–7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“It’s Here! The Monster Campaign.” Columbia Daily Spectator (New York City), 25 April 1934, 2/2. Columbia Spectator Archive.

Lynes, Russell. “How Shoe Can You Get.” Esquire, September 1953, 59 and 128. Esquire Magazine Archive.

Marantz, Andrew. “Is It Happening Here?” New Yorker, 5 May 2025, 30/1. New Yorker Archive.

Mayer, Martin. “Tubs and Bottoms. Harvard: What Makes It Great? What Keeps It Free?” Esquire, September 1953, 118. Esquire Magazine Archive.

Nieman-Marcus “Point of View: On Teenagers” (advertisement). Dallas Morning News (Texas), 7 August 1951, part 3, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, March 2015, s.v. white-shoe, adj.

“Professor and Student Praise New Yale Plan.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 December 1933, 5/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Harris and Ewing, 1917. Wikimedia Commons. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

run it up the flagpole

Buzz Aldrin saluting the flag, Apollo 11, 20 July 1969

27 August 2025

The phrase run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes is credited to Madison Avenue admen of the 1950s. The phrase, and many others like it, is used in the context of brainstorming or “spitballing ideas” and refers to making a suggestion to see if people like it.

Examples of similar ad-speak from the era abound. For instance, this appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on 2 April 1954. It doesn’t contain the flagpole phrase, but it does have several others:

Out in Chicago they have an expression: “Keep your pores open on this one,” which means don’t do anything hasty. (And that, of course, is the general direction of almost all ad agency talk. The idea is for heaven’s sake, be careful. Don’t go rushing into anything.) And when you have finally decided the idea is definitely lousy, you “pull the chain on that one.”

There is generally, in some of the later Madison Ave. patter, a note of pessimism, if not downright cynicism in their gropings with the spoken word. Take this one, for example, which is a very real example of Madison Ave.: “Let’s roll some rocks and see what crawls out.” Obviously the boys are not expecting much. In the old days, they used to “mother hen” an idea, or they’d say “let’s incubate this and see what hatches,” and this, with its intimations of maternity, was kind of sweet and touching. Now, they’re rolling rocks and you know what crawls out from under those.

The earliest use of the flagpole phrase itself, or rather a variant wording of it, that I’m aware of appears in a column on Madison Avenue ad-speak in the Washington Post and Times Herald of 24 December 1954:

Of course, there are the usual endless variations on “let’s kick it around,” which means “Let’s for heavens [sic] sake, somebody come with an idea.” “Let’s blow feathers around the room.” “Let’s run it up the rack and look underneath.” “Let’s run the flag up the pole and see who starts saluting.”

The following year, we get the phrase in what would become its canonical word order in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg News of 11 November 1955:

MADISONIANA—From time to time John Crosby, vigorous chronicler of the radio and television world, has reported on the unique ionospheric imaginery [sic] that has become a familiar Madison Avenue by-product of creative minds in conference. Quite independently, Guyon Madison picked up on this one: “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see how many people salute it.”

And there is this found in a pair of columns on the advertising industry in the New York Herald Tribune in November 1956. On 12 November, Joseph Kaselow’s column read:

The [newspaper feature] writer said he would get back to the p. r. man and in a short while he did. And here, so help me, is what he said: “I took it in to one of the editors and ran it up the flagpole, but nobody saluted; so I guess it’s dead.”

As we said, this thing is serious. It must be nipped in the bud. Or next thing you know somebody will be writing a book about “The Man in the Green Flannel Eyeshade.”

Three days later, Kaselow wrote:

The other day we had an item about a newspaper feature writer who turned down a story by saying he’s taken to the editors and run it up the flagpole, but nobody saluted. We played it up as a case of the creeping influence of Madison Ave. on the native—and what’s worse, the editorial tongu[e].

The Herald Tribune was not the only outlet reporting on ad-speak. William Morris wrote this for the Milwaukee Journal on 13 September 1956:

The advertising fraternity, incidentally and not surprisingy [sic] is noted for the inventive and colorful metaphor used in its own shop talk. Each year Holiday magazine collects the cream of the crop. Here are three from the current batch:

Of a new campaign: “Let’s anchor it in deep water overnight and see if it develops any leaks.[“] (Translation: “I want to catch the 5:02.”) “Let’s get together and cross-pollinate.” (Translation: “I give up—you got any ideas?”) Then there’s my favorite, used about a new and untested idea for a campaign, “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.”

Perhaps the most well-known use of the phrase is in the April 1957 film 12 Angry Men, directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Reginald Rose, where it is uttered by Juror #12, a feckless advertising executive played by Robert Webber:

#12: Y’know in advertising . . . I told you I worked at an ad agency, didn’t I? (#11 nods) Well there are some pretty strange people . . . not strange really . . . they just have peculiar ways of expressing themselves, y’know what I mean? (#11 nods again) Well, it’s probably the same in your business, right? What do you do?

#11: I’m a watchmaker.

#12: Really? The finest watchmakers come from Europe I imagine. (#11 bows slightly) Anyway, I was telling you, in the agency, when they reach a point like this in a meeting, there’s always some character ready with an idea. And it kills me, I mean it’s the weirdest thing in the whole world sometimes precede the idea with some kind of phrase. Like . . . some account exec’ll say, “Here’s an idea. Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it.” (#12 laughs) I mean, it’s idiotic, but it’s funny. . .”

The OED Online has this as the earliest example of the phrase, erroneously dating it to 1955. 12 Angry Men, written by Rose, had been originally produced in 1954 as an episode of CBS-TV’s Studio One. It was then adapted into a stage play by Sherman L. Sergel the following year. The flagpole phrase does not appear in either of these earlier versions. Evidently the OED conflated the 1955 stage play with the script for the 1957 movie.

Of all these ad-speak phrases, the one that survives is run it up the flagpole. It would appear that all of them did indeed arise among Madison Avenue admen, but the use of run it up the flagpole in the movie catapulted that particular one to stardom and immortality.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Thanks to Garson O’Toole, Fred Shapiro, and Stephen Goranson for pointing out some of the early citations.

Crosby, John. “Radio and Television: The Ad Agency Language.” New York Herald Tribune, 2 April 1954, 21/1–2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “A Refresher Course in that Madison Avenue Language.” Washington Post and Times Herald, 24 December 1954, 31/1. ProQuest Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 1 August 2025, s.v. run. v.

Kaselow, Joseph. “Advertising Field: Guards Up, Men.” New York Herald Tribune, 12 November 1956, A5/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “Advertising Field: Sound and Fury.” New York Herald Tribune, 15 November 1956, A7/5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Madison, Guyon. “Manhattan Days and Nights.” Williamsburg News (Brooklyn), 11 November 1955, 6/3. Newspapers.com.

Morris, William. “Words, Wit and Wisdom.” Milwaukee Journal (Wisconsin), 13 September 1956, Green Sheet 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, March 2011, s.v. run, v.

Rose, Reginald. “Twelve Angry Men.” Studio One, CBS-TV, 1954. YouTube.

———. Twelve Angry Men (film script), 1957, 220–221. ScriptSlug.

Rose, Reginald and Sherman L. Sergel. Twelve Angry Men. A Play in Three Acts. Woodstock, Illinois: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1955.

Photo credit: Neil A. Armstrong/NASA, 1969. Wikimedia Commons. NASA, AS11-40-5874. Public domain photo.