Flack

Flack is a derogatory term for a publicist or press agent in the entertainment industry. This slang term, primarily used in the United States, has had its use extended with the passage of time to include all public relations practitioners and activities. The origin of the term is unknown, but many attribute the coining of the term to Variety magazine, which some sources say began using the term as a tribute to motion picture industry publicist Gene Flack in acknowledgment of his skills in promoting movies in the 1940s.

Wes Pederson, director of communications and public relations, Public Affairs Council, in a letter to the Public Relations Society of America's The Strategist, attributed the first explanation of the term in common usage to Peter Martin in a Saturday Evening Post article in the April 1, 1950, issue. Martin's lead in that article, entitled “Hollywood Says: ‘Please Stay Away!’” reads, “My friend, the movie-studio flack, came back from hoofing it around the jungle of soundstages and buildings, all fronts and no backs, that was his beat.” In the very next sentence, Martin explains that “flack is Hollywood slang for publicity worker or press agent.”

However, the Oxford English Dictionary lists the first reference to the use of flack as slang to Stewart Sterling. In his 1946 Fire Marshal Pedley detective story, Where There's Smoke, one of the characters announces, “That publicity flack is here.”

The first reference book to include the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was Al Berkman's 1961 Singers' Glossary of Show Business Jargon. The term was defined in that reference source as “a member of the Publicity Department (usually of a motion picture studio); press agent.”

The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, published in 1962, notes that “flack is a slang term common in the theatrical and [Page 327]popular-music fields, meaning ‘press agent.’ We have been familiar with it in this sense for years and suspect it antedates the World War II meaning of ‘flak’…; that of antiaircraft fire.” The Morris Dictionary goes on to observe that “it has never enjoyed the wide popular acceptance given, for example, the term ‘disc jockey,’ which became current in entertainment circles at about the same time.”

Almost every reference to flack includes another reference to flak, a 1938 term for an antiaircraft gun, borrowed from the German flak, an acronym formed from Fl(ieger)a(bwehr)k(anone), literally airplane defense cannon. One surmises that if, in fact, there is an association between these two terms, it is meant to imply that a Hollywood press agent or publicist is a cannon of empty rhetoric.

More likely is the association with one of the now obsolete definitions at the root of the word flack. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word derives from the Middle English formation of the Middle Dutch vlacken and the Icelandic flaka meaning “to flap.” The transitive form of the word meant “to move or shake intermittently.” In agricultural usage, flack meant “to beat with a flail.”

Taken together, it seems more probable that the original slang had more to do with someone being a “mover or shaker” or actively pushing a story or client with such vigor that journalists felt they were being “beaten with a flail,” than anything to do with an air defense cannon or the type of shell it fires.

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