Topic: Scratchpad
George Orwell criticized it as a bad habit, but personally I like the fact that the English language is so hospitable to foreign words. It’s rather cool to have pundit (from Hindustani) and trek (from Afrikaans) as part of our vocabulary. But it can produce moments of annoyance as well.
Take the word flak—meaning, in contemporary American English, criticism or complaints, e.g. “Tom took a lot of flak over a blog post that was less than complimentary to President Obama.” Flak comes to English from German and is actually an acronym for the German word Fliegerabwehrkanone (antiaircraft gun). The pilots of the Eighth Air Force took plenty of flak over Germany during World War II, and that’s how the word made it into English.
So far, so good—but here’s the annoying part. Many people in writing this word spell it flack, which is quite incorrect. There’s no c in the original German word and it serves no purpose as an aid to pronunciation. In fact, flack is an entirely different word—it’s slang a press agent or publicist. So I call it a lazy mistake when someone writes that President Obama’s catching a lot of flack over high gas prices. No, no, no—he needs a flack to help him deal with all the flak. Got that?
