Will the Fixer ‘Flip’? Here Are the Many Meanings of That Word

The commander in chief turned to Twitter the other day, as he does.

The pair of tweets was remarkable, even for him, containing misspellings (the word is “flunky,” the New York Times Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter is Maggie Haberman), a possibly actionable defamatory statement (the supposed “drunk/drugged up loser” is identifiable, according to Haberman, as the former campaign aide Sam Nunberg), the usual poor punctuation and woo-woo capitalization, and what would have to be described as an outright lie. I’d give Trump a pass on the chummy snap of him and Haberman that immediately blew up on Twitter, as she may have been one of an assembly line of photo subjects at a White House event.

Rather, it’s the at least five on-the-record interviews he’s given Haberman, as president, that blatantly contradict the “who I don’t speak to” claim.

However, what interested me most about the tweets is Trump’s use of flip. To be sure, he’s not the only one to apply the verb to the “businessman for his own account” (whatever that means) Cohen. Check out this montage from Late Night With Seth Meyers:

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines flip as “to cooperate in the prosecution of a criminal case against an associate.” The first citation in Green’s Dictionary of Slang is from the 1960 book The Scene, by Clarence Cooper: “I won’t flip on you. I’ll never flip on nobody again.” In his final novel, At the End of the Day (2000), that master of argot George V. Higgins used it in the slightly narrower intransitive sense of turning state evidence: “He’s the one that made Bernie flip and Bernie gave him me.”

Flip is an astonishingly productive word, especially for slang. Nowadays, one hears a lot about Democrats flipping Republican districts and shrewd investors flipping houses. The phrase “flip the script,” which originated in hip-hop in the early ‘90s, is now widely used to mean turn a situation around. (Green’s Dictionary’s first citation is from 1991, Pete Rock and CL Smooth: “Okay, you wanna act trife and flip the script.” Trife: “Being in a tough situation, being hopeless or helpless, living in poverty. Rough, difficult, troublesome.” —Urban Dictionary)

Then there’s flipping burgers, flipping someone the bird, flipping out or flipping one’s lid (meaning either to go crazy or go crazy for someone or something), Flip as derogatory slang for Filipino, and flip phones, the persistence of which seems to inspire a feature article every month, like clockwork. And all that is dealing only with the more socially acceptable meanings of flip. Here’s a screenshot of Green’s entries on some of the others:

For more on the history of the word, see Ben Zimmer’s piece last year in the Wall Street Journal.

Back to Michael Cohen, the most interesting thing about Trump’s use of flip is what it apparently acknowledges about Cohen: that he actually has damaging information to offer the authorities.

Then again, fixers usually do. That word has been widely applied to Cohen, including by Ana Cabrera in the Seth Meyers sequence and, somewhat more surprisingly, routinely in the pages of The New York Times. For example, a recent sentence in the Times read: “Mr. Cohen served for more than a decade as a trusted fixer for Mr. Trump, and during the campaign had helped tamp down brewing scandals about women who claimed to have had affairs with him.” That’s surprising because the word, which began as American slang in the late 19th century, implies underhanded and possibly illegal dealings. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes a definition in a 1914 Vocabulary of Criminal Slang: “one who acts as go-between for thieves and bribe takers. Example: ‘If you get a rumble, send for Jones, the mouthpiece; he’s a sure-shot fixer and can square anything short of murder.’” More recently, the word has been used more neutrally by foreign correspondents to describe a native employee who helps out with translation, procurement, and bureaucratic bottlenecks.

But Cohen, what with his payoffs to Stormy Daniels and other people with potentially dangerous stories to tell, is definitely a fixer of the old school. Will he end up flipping? Let’s flip a coin.