It all began the other night at a dinner party full of strangers. The questions consisted of the usual trifecta: Where are you from? What major are you? What school do you go to? And, as always, I got flak for attending a university whose name no normal person can pronounce on the first try.
Everyone else in attendance at the dinner went to schools like Hamilton, Queen Mary, Warwick and even the occasional easy−to−dyslexicize three−letter acronym school. But nothing that quite measured up to the good old light−on−the−hill with its "F" and "T" and "S" packed in so tightly together, it's begging you to develop a speech impediment.
(Go Jumbos.)
To return to my point, though, as people were pretending to know what the difficult−to−pronounce word they finally got right was — we got "the one in Boston" (seriously, London?) and the "the place that Raft is based on" (Raft being the fictional university that Daria applies to in the MTV series "Daria," circa Y2K) — I was complaining about how we get too much flack for it. Or was it flak?
And therein lay my dilemma. The rest of the conversation was lost on me as I spaced out, trying to figure out when I had last seen that strange word on paper. "Flak" turned into "flack" and back into "flak" in my mind, as I tried to reconcile either discarding or holding onto that mystifying "c" (I think at one point, my dinner companions searched for Medford, Mass. on Google Maps while I continued to ponder). But upon my return home, I was left not with the long−awaited answer to my troubles, but one of those moments that, after spending too much brain energy not to be wholly invested in even the simplest of quandaries, resulted in an all−too−dreaded "oh."
"Flak" and "Flack" are both words. Different words. Most dictionaries today list the two as alternate spellings of one another, but the two arrived in the Oxford English Dictionary from opposite sides of the world and have, not surprisingly, distinct meanings.
We'll start with Flack. Flack — meaning a publicist, publicity, to publicize or to act as a publicist for — pays homage to one particular publicist, Gene Flack, a successful 1930s movie agent. The word was intentionally popularized by Variety Magazine, the same people who brought you "corny" and who were known for their penchant for disseminating slang phrases. "Flack" is what publicity agents seek for their clients.
Around the same time in Germany during World War II, the German army was shooting down American planes with fliegerabwehrkanone. No, I didn't spell that wrong. In their usual manner of taking a sentence worth of words and getting rid of the spaces in the name of efficiency and grammar rules that I don't understand, the German language took three words, meaning individually, "airplane," "defense" and "canon" to get the one monster compound fliegerabwehrkanone, German for the anti−aircraft guns Germany used during the war.
American GIs shortened the word to "flak" and used it describe the gun's fire, later bastardized to mean criticism.
The two words definitely have their overlap, especially when publicity turns sour, but the GIs that first used "flak" to mean something incidentally kind−of−similar−but−not−really as "flack" most likely had never even heard of the Variety Magazine editorial board's strange pastime, as they were busy fighting the Germans' plan for world domination and just generally not being in America.
The fine line between "flack" and "flak" comes down to the difference between the publicity that we aim for versus the kind of public embarrassment we ward off.
So I was probably complaining about my dinner companions giving me flak, which would make a lot of sense. Really, they should have been giving me flack instead.
(Go Jumbos.)
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Romy Oltuski is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Romy.Oltuski@tufts.edu.
