Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2018-04-11
I first noticed this one on the Sydney Morning Herald website, headlining an article about a lawyer who grossly overcharged a client: “Ways to wrack up a monster legal bill” at http://www.smh.com.au/. (This will probably change as the news site updates, but I have a screenshot if anyone’s interested.)
See also:
“Gamers wrack up points…” at http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2008 … 526364.txt
“Apple retail wrack up impressive sales…” at http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/a … quare_foot
A quick Google search turns up 17,000 hit for “wrack up” vs. over 8 million for “rack up.” But this could just be a misspelling, since “wrack” is not a very common word.
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Welcome to the Forum, sneed8720.
I don’t know if “misspelling” is quite the word for it – I would expect the simpler and more common <r> to replace <wr>, rather than the other way ‘round.
I agree with you that wrack is extremely rare. This might make some people more likely to see it as part of a (somewhat opaque) idiom, though. Compare kith and kin or hearth and home, in which obsolete words turn up in fixed idioms.
That being said, I do not think wrack up is an eggcorn. The key point is that wrack up doesn’t introduce anything to the semantics of the phrase. An eggcorn introduces a semantic image such that the reshaping makes sense to its user (at least according to my definition, but see the various threads on “criteria”).
If the user understands wrack as a variant of wreck, then “wrack up a bill” doesn’t make any obvious sense. On the other hand, if the user has no meaning in mind for wrack, then by definition it cannot add to the semantics of the phrase.
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Adding this other instance—also in the Sydney Morning Herald—of “wrack up” instead of “rack up”: “The court had heard how the Darwins hatched the plan to fake John’s death at a time when they had wracked up massive debts and were facing bankruptcy.” (http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/jail-f … ntentSwap1)
I’ve noticed the addition of a “w” in front of various words that normally begin with “r” recently, and although I agree that they may not be eggcorns YET, maybe one day someone will point out the different semantic image that is being evoked by the use of “wr” instead of “r”—-which at the moment, to me, appears to simply be a misspelling.
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Words which begin with wr almost all have a notion of twisting. This is a spelling counterpart of the “sound-symbolic” things like fl, sl, scr, ... in flap, slap, scrap and so forth. On the other hand, some speakers, and I find to my surprise that I am one of them, actually round our lips more on words written with wr: check yourself and see if you pronounce the beginning consonants of written and ridden the same, for instance.
Anyway, wracking up debts, or wracking your brain, has a bit of a wrench to it, that I find missing in racking up the debts or your brain. It wreaks more havoc, so to speak. I almost get the feeling of something getting screwed in, putting pressure on the person, rather than pulling the person apart on the rack (racking your brains), or racking up more and more points (racking up debts).
It’s pretty subtle, and I wouldn’t be at all sure that all English speakers get it. So I don’t mind if you skeptics write it off (btw. the Nawatl word for write involves making wroughten shapes like curlicues) as irrelevant. But it’s definitely there for me.
Still, at best a pretty subtle, if not a downright stealthy, eggcorn.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2008-07-23 18:06:07)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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