Pylimitics

If a Hollywood studio makes a war movie set in, say, World War II, there’s sure to be some flak involved as anti-aircraft guns try to shoot down enemy planes. There’s also sure to be some flacks in involved as the studio hires public relations people to publicize the film to increase the audience. 

“Flak” and “flack,” even though they’re homonyms, are extremely different words. “Flak” is short for the German word “fliegerabwehrkanone” (air-defense guns). The word, like the technology, really came out of WWII, and first showed up in about 1938. It was such a useful term (at the time) that it was adopted into English almost instantly. 

As time went on, “flak” began to be used figuratively as well, meaning things like criticism, negative reviews, and the like. Nowadays, when the military approach to shooting down enemy planes tends to involve missiles instead of guns, the figurative sense is the most common use of “flak.”

“Flack” means a press agent or public relations person, whose job is to increase media coverage of some subject, product, or person. “Flack” arose a few years before “flak,” and also has an unusual origin — it comes from the publicist Gene Flack, who worked in Chicago. “Flack” is also used as a verb; “to flack for a film” means to promote it. 

Even though flak and flack are very different, they unexpectedly collided in 1970 in Tom Wolfe’s book Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Wolfe invented the term “flak-catcher”, by which he meant a publicist with the specific job of responding to criticism. I’m sure pilots in WWII would have much preferred catching criticism to the kind of flak they were in danger of catching.