![]() ![]() ![]() Why are units of measurement singular in compound adjectives, e.g. Why don't some contractions work in certain places? That is, why can't we answer the question "Is she coming?" with "Yes, she's"? Why do I sometimes see are with company or team names, as in "Apple are announcing a new iPhone"? Why do I sometimes hear constructions like needs washed or needs looked at? Is it "between you and me" or "between you and I"? How do I indicate possession when something belongs to two people? Should I use a or an before this word, acronym, or initialism? Looking for books about grammar, style and conventions? Check out our list of resources. Every top-level comment must accurately answer OP's question and provide a thoughtful, knowledgeable explanation based on evidence. I go sailing, make biofuel, and have blissful moments./r/grammar is a friendly and knowledgeable community dedicated to helping posters with questions about grammar, language, style, conventions and punctuation. In which I take Menticia and Itxa to the beach I had no idea it was wrong until I read this blog post today! THANKS!! I knew it was "racking my brain" but have been writing "nerve-wracking" for years. I've been racking my brain so much over this I may have wracked it! Now I'm totally confused over which spelling I should use in a letter I'm writing. I was writing the phrase in a FB comment and didn't know how to spell it either! Now I can stop racking my brain over "racking my brain"! LOL!Thanks for this! You gotta love the internet!!! Everything is right there when you need it. I can't believe how many of us had this question.thank you so much for your post!! For my letter, I chose "racking." Thanks. Then I read your blog entry, which gave me a better basis for deciding which way to go. For the record, as of today,, "racking my brain" had 791,000 references on google, and "wracking my brain" had 102,000 references. This isn't a very good way to settle the question, but I thought it would tell me if one spelling was clearly correct or strongly preferred to the other. "wracking my brain"), and see which one had more online references. My first instinct was to google the phrase both ways ("racking my brain" vs. I also had this question, though a few years after the wrest of you. I was racking my brain looking for a way to write this :) it's weird how you say things all of the time then they seem so odd when you put them on paper! Thanks for such a fantastic and precise posting. So when you say Im racking my brain, it means that you are giving your brain a lot of work to do, thereby stressing it. I use the phrase verbally quite a bit, but I'm not usually called to write it, so I was stumped. how the heck did google know i was looking for the SPELLING?! well, it didnt. Where's William Safire when you need him?Īmazing! i just had the EXACT same question (ie how do you spell 'rack' in this exact context?), googled 'racking my brain' & yours was the FIRST entry with probably as precise an answer anyone could expect. Nerve-wracking and rack and ruin are both relatively common in America.īecause of semantic overlap it is not always possible to tell which word is meant: if a business is "(w)racked" by competition, is it being tortured by competition, or is it being ruined by competition? So the correct phrases are wrack and ruin and storm-wracked. A different wrack means 'something wrecked wreckage', or as a verb 'to wreck ruin'. means 'damage or destruction', and is related to wreck and wreak. The expression nerve-racking also ultimately derives from this rack. (This stems from the familiar rack 'a framework'.) This rack was used as a verb meaning 'to torture on the rack', and hence in the transferred sense 'to torture', and then figuratively 'to stretch or strain', which is the sense in rack (one's) brain. derives from the rack, the medieval instrument of torture on which a victim was slowly stretched. The spellings of these words have varied over the years, and the interrelated strands are so "exceedingly complicated" that our colleague Robert Burchfield, former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, recommends that you "spare an hour (at least) to consult a large dictionary" to understand them. The spellings rack and wrack represent about nine (or seven, or sixteen-it depends who's dividing things up) different etymologically unrelated words, some of which have meanings that overlap. Do you have any information about this phrase?" ![]() Should it be racking my brain or wracking my brain? And it made me wonder about its origin. Joann Hill writes: " Racking my brain - I recently wrote this phrase for the first time after using it only in conversation before and I wasn't sure how to spell it. ![]()
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