The flags came down on Wednesday, and the proclamation that ordered it reached public inspection at a quarter past eleven this morning, five days before it lifts

A presidential proclamation ordering flags to half-staff takes effect when it is signed, not when it is printed. This one was signed on 25 August. It reached the Federal Register public inspection desk at 11.15 this morning, document number 2026-17716, and publishes on 28 August, three days after the fact and five days before it expires.

Proclamation 11057 orders the flag of the United States flown at half-staff as a mark of respect for the memory of Dolly Parton, until sunset on 1 September.

The reach is set out twice, deliberately. The first sentence covers the White House and all public buildings and grounds, all military posts and naval stations, and all naval vessels of the federal government, in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its territories and possessions. A separate direction extends the same period to every United States embassy, legation, consular office and other facility abroad, including military facilities and naval vessels and stations overseas.

The text runs to a little over a page and contains no eulogy, no biography and no list of works. Half-staff proclamations rarely do.

What the document does not say

It does not say when or where she died, and it does not have to. Helen Bushby of the BBC reported that Parton died in hospital in Nashville on 25 August, at 80, after what the report describes as a brief battle with cancer, having been admitted four days earlier with kidney and autoimmune issues. The same report notes that flags across the country were already at half-mast on Wednesday.

Which is the ordinary sequence, and worth stating plainly for anyone who works from the Federal Register rather than from the news: the order was operative from the day it was signed. Publication is the record of it, not the trigger for it.