Hey whatever. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I find the flags that I mention to be aesthetically pleasing. Japan’s reminds me of modern art- a red dot on a white canvas. If a kindergarten child made it, it would go on a refrigerator. If a famous artist did it, it sells for millions. I like flags that have embedded symbolism (US and UK flags), others like tricolors.
I can’t believe I’m agreeing with BLD on national symbols. The US and UK have flags that have very specific history behind them. Of course as a Scot, I have a special place in my heart for St. Andrew’s Cross. But taking the US and UK flags in context, they convey very specific points in each country’s history. And are very relevant to each country’s history.
That’s one of the neat things I like about the World Cup is seeing the English flag as opposed to the Union Jack.
Well, Japan’s flag does have embedded symbolism. The Japanese for “Japan” is “Nihon”, and that is loosely translated as “land of the rising sun”. So you find the red “ni” or sun as the only symbol on the Japanese flag.
For the record, the Star of David in the center of the Israeli flag is an old Jewish symbol, and it represents King David and the ancient kingdom of Judea; the two blue stripes represent both the tfillin (Jewish prayer shawl) and the parting of the Red Sea, symbolizing the exodus from captivity.
See? Symbolism!
I got one! How 'bout pilesa’s or bagsa’s as a rhyming slang for brits. Say it out loud to get it. Rhyming is fun.
Cute. You could use “whatthas” for Canadians, too. 
Of course you’re right. I guess the red dot is ok for being symbolic, athough as graphic art it isn’t as cool as Old Glory or the Union Jack.
For the record, not all of us are humorless fucks like Gibson here.
To me calling Americans “septics” is like calling Chinese “chinks” or Frenchmen “frogs.” If someone is comfortable using those terms it says more about the speaker than the group they are mocking.
As far as flags go I can’t agree with Josh’s ratings. How can he have different ratings for Poland, Indonesia and Monaco? Puerto Rico and Cuba? Cote D’Voire and Ireland?
Which is sort of my problem with flags. Too many of them are too unoriginal. How many flags have three stripes on them? The Canadian flag is the Peruvian flag with a leaf on it. The Malaysian flag is the U.S. flag with a crescent. The flags of Iraq, Syria and Yemen are the same. All the Scandinavian flags are the same. Dozens of flags have crescents to prove how Islamic the countries are while many other flags have crosses.
The designs are rarely great either. I had an art teacher who often critiqued students work by telling them their paintings were “Japanese flags.” In other words, no composition just an object in the middle. Of course, Bangladesh, Nazi Germany and others have copied that design as well.
Nor are all of us painfully stupid and deliberately rude like Excalibre here.
I think some people are missing the point regarding the use of “septic” as slang for Americans. It’s just a cute, roundabout way of saying “American”; the only connection being drawn between the two things is that a slang word for one rhymes with the other. Similarly, were I to refer to my friend as my “China plate”, I’m just calling him my mate, not making some comment on how he’s expensive but fragile.
That said, I only rarely hear rhyming slang (it seems very dated to me). “Yank” is common, but “septic” not so much, to my ears, anyway.
Possibly, though I suspect there’s a little more connection than just the rhyme. I wonder if the concept of rhyming slang is just outside the typical American’s sense of poetry, or something. If I started to refer to my car as a pickle jar, or to my wife as a pocket knife, it would seem, to my Seppo ears, neither cute nor comprehensible. But I’ve studied language enough to know that slang doesn’t always hold up to logic.
I don’t find the term especially offensive, but then I’ve been an expat Septic for 12 years or so, and I’m accustomed to the fact that no one likes us much. (Cue “Political Science” by Randy Newman now–and if you aren’t familiar with the lyrics, please understand that he is being completely sarcastic, making fun of the US, not everyone else. Besides, he agrees in the song to save Australia: “Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo.”) I’m grateful that most–okay, some–of the non-Americans that I meet abroad see me as an individual, with my own individual flaws and the occasional good point, and not primarily as a nationality. And I’ll admit that quite a few Americans tend to be more irritatingly patriotic than other folks, too.
Still, according to Ravenman’s link from the first page, other rhyming expressions for Yank (Cockney slang may differ from Australian, I suppose) include Wooden Plank, Petrol Tank, and Sherman Tank. While none seem particularly clever to me, they don’t have the negative connotation of Septic Tank, do they? To imply that your mate is an expensive and fragile serving dish is not exactly the same as calling him a tank of sewage. This site admits that while it can be a teasing term of endearment, it is more often used for ridicule and shame. Again, one gets used to it.
Oh, about the OP. I never liked the whole flag thing either, and certainly not flag-waving. Then again, I never liked the idea of countries.
I suppose one could argue that “paki” is a cute way of saying Pakistani, but I doubt many Pakistanis in the U.K. would agree. My rule of thumb concerning epitaphs is could a reasonable person be offended by it? If so, I don’t use it.
I don’t know how harmless this term is either. When I first heard the term “septic” I googled it to see what the hell it meant. I got a bunch of links to viciously anti-American sites. Google has since nixed these links so you can’t do this search anymore.
Google doesn’t nix links. I remember a case involving Scientologists where they forced a redirect to a a legal notice for the top link but other than that, it doesn’t happen. If a page goes down, Google still probably has it cached. When I googled septic, one of the top hundred searches was about some kind of punk band and the rest were medical and plumbing related. It’s the same if you add terms like American or yank.
The kinds of people I know who are anti-Septic would never use the word to refer to Americans as it’s too playful. Can you please just dig up a couple of links to viciously anti-American pages using septic?
The discussion at the top of this talk page attached to the Australian_English Wikipedia page is quite good. There are some different views but none are really contradictory and all give some useful perspectives of the issue.