Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2011-03-08
Wrecked with guilt.
“Oiler cried throughout the hearing, and said in a statement read by her attorney that she’s wrecked with guilt.”
Source: http://www.nbc15.com/home/headlines/17204881.html
Or could it be wracked with guilt…?
Again, embarrassed for my colleages of (allegedly) J-school degree, and in the city from which America’s first Journalism school sprang: Madison, Wisconsin.
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I think that’s a really fun eggcorn!
There are lots of other people using it that way, per Google.
I also wonder if perhaps they should have put that in quotes? Because it’s from that statement, so perhaps that’s exactly the word her attorney said. And the reporter & editors didn’t notice?
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This is probably a demi-eggcorn, which Arnold Zwicky defined as “errors in which one or more parts of an expression are re-spelled so as to replace opaque parts by recognizable lexical material, but without any noticeable improvement in the semantics.”
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language … 05026.html
Oxford English Dictionary defines wracked as “That has undergone or suffered wreck, esp. shipwreck; ruined, destroyed.” In other words, it means the same thing that wrecked does.
Of course, wrecked is more common (about 8 million raw Google hits) than wracked (about 981,000). Furthermore, more than 40% of those pages in Google that contain wracked also contain either guilt or pain, suggesting that it probably appears commonly in set phrases.
There are several related threads in the Forum:
‘Wrack’ vs. ‘rack’
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=177
Theory of the Stealth Eggcorn
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=1649
“nerve raking” for “nervewracking”
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=2083
‘wrapped/rapt’ for ‘racked’ (with pain)
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=2277
And the new one, inspired by this one:
‘wrapped with guilt’ for ‘wracked with guilt’
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=2598
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