Fun With Words: Fla(c)k

[malthaussen]

FLAK was originally an acronym, it meant FLugzeugAbwehr Kanone, which is German for anti-aircraft gun. Thus the expression "catching Flak" was originally pretty serious stuff: it meant that while you were flying over a German city trying to bomb it back into the Stone Age, they were shooting at you and trying to turn you into a fireball. Well, we all know how that one turned out: we bombed more of their cities back into the Stone Age than they were able to turn planes into fireballs. After the war, in business parlance "catching Flak" came to mean receiving criticism or complaints from consumers, it apparently not being just a jungle out there, but an Air Defense Zone. As the art of Public Relations was evolving quickly after the Second World War, companies came to create positions for PR men to catch the flak, and they were called – get this – flak catchers. The idea was that they would listen to the complaints and make soothing noises, thus allowing the serious company executives to concentrate on making money. Which is anyway better than being turned into a fireball. The "catchers" part of the name was dropped pretty quickly, and the position became known as a "flak," increasingly spelled "flack" as people apparently forgot the origins of the word. It looks like an overcorrection, anyway, but it is possibly significant that anti-aircraft guns in England were known as "ack-ack," and maybe some concatenation of the terms might have occurred. (In the US, however, anti-aircraft guns were known as "AAA" or "Triple-A," for "Anti-Aircraft Artillery," which for whatever reason failed to make the grade as a corporate term)

In continued evolution, fla(c)k seems to have become the name for a PR person who doesn't so much deal with complaints as put out the company line. There is an implication that nothing they say can be taken seriously, that they are just making soothing mouth-noises to appease the unruly masses. Funnily enough, their kind of output is often called "chaff," which was the word for little bits of aluminum which planes ejected to fool radar screens so the flak couldn't turn them into fireballs. Obviously, public relations is today's strategic bombing.

Well, that's two minutes of your life you won't get back, but thanks for reading.

-- Mal

[Scuba]

1. Fun, thanks.