Flake has meant "a packet of cocaine" since the 1920s, but it first appeared in its meaning of an odd, eccentric person, often a colorful, likable eccentric person, in the 1950s, probably in baseball. It possible referred originally to "offbeat San Francisco outfielder Jackie Brandy, from whose mind , it was said, things seemed to flake off and disappear," according to Tim Considine, writing in the New York Times Magazine and quoted in Paul Dickson's The Dickson Baseball Dictionary (1989). Then again, the flake of eccentricity could derive from association with the narcotics sense of the word. Stuart Berg Flexner's Listening to America (1982) says flake appeared "in professional football in the early 1970s, especially when referring to John Don Looney (who couldn"t after all, be called merely a looney . . .), who attacked tackling dummies in anger and seldom heeded signs . . . - In any case, consistent sports use of the word made it common American slang.