In the context of cooking, what is the difference between "flipper" and "spatula"?

A spatula in cooking is a flat object often made of rubber or metal meant to spread, mix or lift food.

A flipper or turner are flat objects usually made of metal or plastic designed to slide under a piece of food in a pan or on a grill. The broad flat blade facilities easy turning of the food. (Flipper sounds more like a colloquialism for turner to me. Also Pancake Flipper or Burger Flipper is frequently used to refer to the person doing the flipping - that is a short-order cook …)

Rubber (or silicone) spatulas with handles are also called scrapers. (With no handle they are called bowl scrapers.)

Small metal spatulas are often called icing knives.

A spatula can refer to any tool with a small flat blade. It is derived directly from Latin, having come to English in the 1520s as a medical instrument. Spatula the diminutive of the Latin spatha meaning a "broad, flat tool or weapon," from Greek spathe "broad flat blade (used by weavers)".

Update Based upon my review of multiple cook's tool resellers (Williams-Sonoma, etc.) it seems that turners are frequently called spatulas. And, rubber scrapers are also called spatulas. But, a rubber scraper cannot be called a turner, and vice-versa.

Interestingly, if you search for images of spatula in Google, about half of the images are for the device used to turn over pancakes, and half are for the device used to scrape food from a jar.

A similar search for turner results in images for the artist. However, a sidebar offers images for kitchen turner which leads to pictures of the pancake reorienting machine. Delving into these images offer a variety of terms, such as slotted turner, griddle turner and pancake turner.

A search for turner on the Amazon shopping site offers a range of griddle or pan related utensils. A similar search for spatula yields the mixed bag.

A search in Google images or Amazon for flipper yields dolphins (the mammals not the fish).

In sum, if the interweb is to be believed, spatula means either an inversion device or a scraping device, and turner means an inversion device.