Fracking, Fracing, Or Frac'ing?

Scott Detrow

Recent Stories

Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

September 6, 2011 | 9:46 AM

At StateImpact Pennsylvania, we aim to answer the really important questions.
Such as: just how do you spell fracking – the shorthand term for hydraulic fracturing – and does the verb have anything to do with Battlestar Galactica?
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Andrew Maykuth gets to the heart of the matter in a piece that ran this weekend:

The gas-drilling frack should not be confused with the made-for-TV frak, a faux curse coined by the writers of the science-fiction series “Battlestar Galactica” long before hydraulic fracturing moved into the mainstream. The Battlestar producers wanted a four-letter word, so they deliberately spelled the word with only a K.
The ambiguity of frack has some unintended consequences, including creating new parental challenges. One Mount Airy mother whose young son encountered a neighbor’s anti-drilling sign struggled over when was the right age to talk to her child about fracking.