flap / flip / flop / flip-flop

In the midst of his 2004 presidential campaign, Senator John Kerry said of his vote on funding for the war in Iraq, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.” This may be one of the most bald-faced and succinct examples of flip-flopping in American politics, but it is hardly the first. Flip-floppers, or simply floppers, as they were originally known, have been so-called for almost two centuries, and they’ve been around under other names for a lot longer.

Both flip and flop are variants of the verb to flap, which is first recorded in the fourteenth century meaning to strike a sudden blow or as a noun meaning such a blow. Flap was applied to the flight of birds in the sixteenth century. The standalone verb to flip isn’t recorded until the early seventeenth century, but it probably dates to the same period as flap. And we have the reduplicative adverb flip-flap also appearing in the sixteenth century. In his 1583 Anatomie of Abuses, pamphleteer Phillip Stubbes comments on men’s fashion of the day, in particular on the practice of wearing ruffs, or those frilled Elizabethan collars:

They haue great and monsterous ruffes, made either of Cambrick, holland, lawn or els of some other the finest cloth that can be got for money, whereof some be a quarter of a yard deep, yea some more, very few lesse.

So that they stand a full quarter of a yarde (and more) from their necks hanging ouer their shoulder poynts, insted of a vaile. But if Aeolus with his blasts, or Neptune with his stormes, chaunce to hit vppon the crasie bark of their brused ruffes, then they goe flip flap in the winde like rags flying abroad, and lye vpon their shoulders like the dishcloute of a slutte.

Here slut is being used to refer to a slovenly woman, not necessarily one who exercises her sexual agency.

And a few pages later Stubbes presages the twentieth-century use of flip-flop to refer to a heelless sandal when he comments of on the practice of men wearing pantofles, a type of indoor slipper, out in public:

For how should they be easie, when as the héele hangeth an inch or two ouer the slipper on the ground? Insomuch as I haue knowen diuers mens legs swel with the same. And handsome how should they be, when as with their flipping & flapping vp and down in ye dirte they exaggerate a mountain of mire & gather a heape of clay & baggage together, loding the wearer with importable burthen?

The present-day sense of flip-flop meaning a heelless sandal, usually made of plastic or rubber, makes its appearance in the late 1950s.

While flip and flap entered into widespread use early on, flop is a comparative newcomer to the party. There are a few seventeenth-century uses of the noun and verb, but it doesn’t enter into widespread use until the nineteenth century. And it is in the latter half of that that century that we see flip-flop meaning sudden change in a political position. Here is an early example from the Daily Oregonian of 5 December 1867:

“FLIP-FLOP.”—The Walla Walla Statesman has blossomed into the most intense Copperheadism. […] We also observe that the Statesman is rejoicing greatly over the results of the recent elections. It says: “More than half the distance back that we were driven in the ‘fog’ at the Presidential campaign of 1864, we have recovered.” This is good considering the editor of the Statesman himself supported Mr. Lincoln in 1864, and helped to drive the party he now associates with into the “fog” and black Cimmerian darkness which enveloped it at that time. Newell is the grand original flip-flop in journalism.

Copperheads was the nickname given to Democrats during the Civil War who wanted to end the war and preserve the Union by giving into the South’s demands over slavery.

There are other senses of flop. The sense meaning a failure is recorded in Farmer and Henley’s 1903 volume of Slang and Its Analogues. A cheap, temporary place to sleep is recorded in Dave Ranney’s 1910 account of being homeless in New York City:

We got to talking, and he asked me where I was living. I smiled at the idea of my living! I wasn’t even existing! I told him I lived any place where I hung up my hat: that I didn’t put up at the Astor House very often; sometimes at the Delevan, or the Windsor, or in fact, any of the hotels on the Bowery were good enough for me—that is, if I had the price, fifteen cents. You can get a bed in a lodging-house for ten cents, or if you have only seven cents you can get a “flop.” You can sit in some joint all night if you have a nickel, but if you haven’t you can do the next best thing in line, and that is “carry the banner.” Think of walking the streets all night and being obliged to keep moving!

Finally, flop is a term in Hold ’em poker (a variety of seven-card stud) for the first three community cards dealt to the players. In the game each player is dealt a number of cards and then a number (for a total of seven) are dealt face up to be shared by all the players. With bets placed at each deal. The players must make the best five-card hand out of the seven cards dealt. In Texas Hold ’Em, the most popular variant, each player is dealt two hole cards; bets are placed; the flop of three cards is dealt; bets are placed; the turn community card is dealt; bets are placed; finally the river community card is dealt; and the final round of betting commences. This poker use of flop dates to at least the early 1970s.

Sources:

Farmer, John S. and W. E. Henley. Slang and Its Analogues, vol 3 of 7. 1903, s.v. flop, subs., 31–32. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Flip-Flop.” Daily Oregonian, 5 December 1867, 3/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. flop, n.3, flop, n.4, flop, n.5.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. flap, n., flap, v., flip, v., flip-flap, adv, n., & adj., flip-flop, n. & adv., flip-flop, v., flop, n.1 (with poker sense added in 2006), flop, v.

Ranney, Dave. Dave Ranney or Thirty Years on the Bowery: An Autobiography. New York: American Tract Society, 1910, 69–70. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Stubbes, Phillip. The Anatomie of Abuses (part 1). London: John Kingston for Richard Jones, 1583sig. D7v and E4r–v. Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: Michael Popp, 2018, Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.