reckless » wreckless
Spotted in the wild:
- “I was charged with wreckless driving on 9/28/05. I was traveling down Rte 202 in NH. … My question…is this a legitimate wreckless driving charge?” (link)
- “im not bragging about being a wreckless driver, i know i drive wrecklessly.” (link)
- “I got a ticket for speeding in a school zone also. It was actually one mile under wreckless driving.” (link)
Back in 2005, “scarequotes” noted: “Wreckless driving†pulls up 24,500 Google hits, though some of these are obviously wordplay (“wreckless driving†referring to futuristic cars that won’t crash). “Wreckless driver†pulls up 1760.
You can also find a fair number of cites for “wreckless abandon”, but an awful lot of them look like wordplay.
As Laura Staum Casasanto noted when she sent me the third example above, there’s a problem with the meaning: understood literally, “wreckless” is almost the opposite of “reckless”. So this might just be a “demi-eggcorn” reshaping, in which the unfamiliar element reck (historically related to reckon) is re-spelled as a familiar element, wreck, without significantly improving the meaning. There is that connection between driving and wrecks, though.
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