flack

See also: Flack and fläck

English

WOTD – 7 October 2015

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /flæk/

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -æk
• Homophone: flak

Etymology 1

From Middle English flacken (“to palpitate, flutter”), from Old English *flaccian, from Proto-West Germanic *flakkōn, from Proto-Germanic *flakkōną (“to beat”), from Proto-Indo-European *pleḱ-, which could be related to Ancient Greek πλάζω (plázō, “to turn away from”).

Akin to Middle Dutch vlacken (“to flicker, flash, sparkle”), Danish flakke (“to wander”), Swedish flacka (“to rove, rove about, ramble”), Icelandic flakka (“to move”). Compare also Icelandic flaka (“to flap, hang loose”), Swedish flaxa (“to flap, flutter”).

Verb

flack (third-person singular simple present flacks, present participle flacking, simple past and past participle flacked)

1. (intransitive, obsolete) To flutter; palpitate.
2. (intransitive, UK dialectal) To hang loosely; flag.
3. (transitive, UK dialectal) To beat by flapping.

Etymology 2

Most likely flak.

Noun

flack (plural flacks)

1. (Canada, US) A publicist, a publicity agent.
   • 1998, Winston Smith, Art Crime: The Montage Art of Winston Smith‎^[1], page 25:

     Edward Bernay, who was a consultant to the US Delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference which terminated the first World War (and who finally wound up as a flack for the United Fruit Company in Latin America), believed that propaganda and its covert marketing could effectively alter the will of the American public.

   • 1999, Patricia Cornwell, The Southern Cross, page 233:

     Thought you were flack," she said.
     "I'm not flack."
     "All right, P.R., a reporter, a novelist."

   • 2020 October 12, Andrew Marantz, “Why Facebook Can’t Fix Itself”, in The New Yorker‎^[2]:

     In July, Nick Clegg, a former Deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. who is now a top flack at Facebook, published a piece on AdAge.com and on the company’s official blog titled “Facebook Does Not Benefit from Hate,” in which he wrote, “There is no incentive for us to do anything but remove it.”

Verb

flack (third-person singular simple present flacks, present participle flacking, simple past and past participle flacked)

1. (Canada, US) To publicise, to promote.
   • 1997, Don DeLillo, Underworld:

     [..] he told funny stories about his early days in the theater district, flacking shows up and down the street, but Klara wasn’t listening.

Etymology 3

Variant of flak.

Noun

flack (countable and uncountable, plural flacks)

1. Alternative spelling of flak.

Further reading

• “flack”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
• “flack”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.

Anagrams

• Falck