Word.ws English Dictionary

raising the flag and seeing who salutes

raising the flag and seeing who salutes is the present participle and gerund of raise the flag and see who salutes.

Meaning of raise the flag and see who salutes

Verb

raise the flag and see who salutes (third-person singular simple present raises the flag and sees who salutes, present participle raising the flag and seeing who salutes, simple past raised the flag and saw who saluted, past participle raised the flag and seen who saluted)

  1. (US, idiomatic) To float an idea, (or otherwise do some action) to see what response or controversy it generates, usually as a preliminary step.
    • Much of the discourse on and the spirit of group interaction have an improvisational flavor: we “float trial balloons” in the groups we belong to or “raise a flag and see who salutes.”1996, Jo Ann Oravec, Virtual individuals, virtual groups: Human Dimensions of Groupware and Computer Networking, page 312

Questions about raising the flag and seeing who salutes

What is raising the flag and seeing who salutes the present participle and gerund of?
Raising the flag and seeing who salutes is the present participle and gerund of raise the flag and see who salutes.

Words near raising the flag and seeing who salutes in the dictionary

  1. raising the alarm
  2. raising the ante
  3. raising the bar
  4. raising the dead
  5. raising the devil
  6. raising the flag and seeing who salutes
  7. raising the roof
  8. raising the specter
  9. raising the spectre
  10. raising the stakes
  11. raising to the ermine

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: raising the flag and seeing who salutes (page history and authors); raise the flag and see who salutes (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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