I'm looking for a word or phrase specifically used to refer to the act of placing a flag to claim new territory. I'm specifically referring to claiming land in the name of some sovereign, though a more general term will do.


Question: "Caldoniafied" In General Use in the 1980s?
Answer: I would not use the term "Caldoniafied," even in a lighthearted way. In the first place, I'm not aware that the expression was ever common in the United States, either during the 1980s (I spent 1980–81 in Washington, D.C.; 1982–84 in Staten Island, New York; and 1985–89 in Berkeley, California) or afterward.

A Google search turns up just one match for Caldoniafied and none for Caldoniafy. From Ed Ward, "Dedicated to You," in Greil Marcus, ed., Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (1979):


  One night, as they were leaving the backstage of a show, a teenager had called Obediah [Carter, who sang tenor for the "5" Royales] "an old Caldoniafied nigger," and the rest of the guys had to hold him back to keep him from outright throttling the kid.


This incident occurred sometime in late 1959 or early 1960. It's not clear to me what exactly the teenager meant by "Caldoniafied." Since Louis Jordan sang comic and novelty songs (as the "5" Royales often did a decade later), and since Jordan's vocals launched into the high tenor range on "Caldonia" (as Carter's did on various songs in the "5" Royales repertoire), perhaps the kid was implying that Carter was stealing his singing style from Jordan and that the style was in any case behind the times. Or perhaps the kid simply meant that Carter and the other Royales were hopelessly hardheaded in refusing to adapt to the fundamental changes then occurring in R&amp;B and rock. In any event, the remark didn't sit well with Obediah Carter, and I don't get the impression that the choice of "Caldoniafied" as a modifier softened the blow of the ultimate racial epithet. 

It would be difficult (I think) to use "Caldoniafied" today in a non-race-inflected way. The OP's Brooklyn landlady may have pulled it off, but for anyone who has committed Louis Jordan's "Caldonia! Caldonia! What makes your big head so hard?" to memory, it is hard not to think of Caldonia as anything but a lean, lanky, hardheaded Black woman (with great big feet)—even though Jordan never specifies her race or color. In a culture sensitized to and uneasy about the implications of racial innuendo, I would do my best to steer clear of "Caldoniafied," "Jemimafied," "Porgyfied," "Rochesterfied," and the like as if they were so many land mines.