Energy Companies Don’t Like the Term Fracking

Hydrofracking, or “fracking,” has stirred a great deal of attention, you just might want to watch out who you say it around. Industry leaders reportedly don’t like the term because of its linguistic similarities to another common F word ending in K. Also, that one TV show used “frak” as a replacement for the aforementioned word. It’s lewd and we feel uncomfortable using the word to ask our mother to sign the petition to ban it.

Which is exactly what industry leaders argue. The word has a very negative connotation associated with it. Activists have been able to use the charged word as a means of furthering their cause. For example, “Don’t Frack” and “Don’t Frack With My Water” signs are fairly prominent and work well in protest slogans where frack operates as another word. Fortunately for the industry, frack isn’t actually a word.

Hydrofracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, been used within the industry for over two decades, though there hasn’t exactly been a consistent spelling.  The industry says the use of “fracking” by journalists and the media only proliferate negative sentiment for the practice. President Obama danced around the subject in his State of the Union address by never once uttering the word. How much criticism would Obama have received had he used the word “hydrofracking”? So the industry wants to abandon the term and create a new one, preferably one that doesn’t sound so hateful when said aloud. (I suggest hydrohugging or hydrocookies, I mean, who wants to ban cookies.)

Unfortunately, the word has been used so often and is very well-known, even if it were to be rebranded, people would still remember and relate to the word whenever used. But that’s not stopping the industry from trying. It sounds exactly like the corn industry’s desire in 2010 to rebrand High Fructose Corn Sugar as “corn sugar.” That came after Big Corn’s failed videos that argued HFCS isn’t as harmful as the media says. Instead, Saturday Night Live parodied the advertisement.

The energy industry should expect the same. While “fracking” isn’t yet technically accepted in the media as an actual word (The Associated Press Stylebook says it should be placed in quotations, though it is expected to be added in 2012.), it will be fracking hard to stop people from using it.