Run it up the flagpole

The phrase was associated with the advertising agencies then located on Madison Avenue in New York,[1] and with the "men in the grey flannel suits".

[2] Comedians,[2] when mocking corporate culture, were certain to use it, along with expressions such as the whole ball of wax and the use of invented words adding the suffix -wise (e.g. "We've had a good year, revenue wise").

[citation needed] The phrase was also used as an ice breaker between serious moments in the motion picture 12 Angry Men starring Henry Fonda.

"[4] In Allan Sherman captured the essence of this phrase in his 1963 album My Son, the Celebrity, with a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan's "When I Was a Lad".

In a double entendre reflecting the narrator's mental dissonance,[5] the group Harvey Danger used the phrase in their 1997 song "Flagpole Sitta": Fingertips have memories, Mine can't forget the curves of your body And when I feel a bit naughty I run it up the flagpole and see who salutes (But no one ever does) As it became hackneyed, it got a second life as a launching point for the invention of joking variations, such as "Let's drop it in the pool and see if it makes a splash", "Let's throw it against the wall and see if it sticks", "Let's put it in a saucer and see if the cat licks it up", and "Let's put it on the five-fifteen and see if it gets off at Westport" (i.e., let's put it on a New York City commuter train and find out whether it is destined for Westport, Connecticut, a town thought to be the home of many successful executives).