In Which I Am Wrong

The things I do consistently:

1.) Turn on the subtitles and closed captioning in Netflix, prime, live tv.

2.) Audibly correct the spelling any time I see "nerve-wracking" spelled as "nerve racking." Last week I even asked someone. "It's spelled with a 'w' right?" She confirmed that yes, like wracked with pain, it gets a w. 

(THE HYPOCRISY yes, I know. I cannot see the beam in mine own eye. I should have out a typo in that sentence just to make the point.)

I saw "nerve-racking" again yesterday, on the CNN closed-captioning, and went in search of the answer, and I found that while both are right, 'nerve-racking' is preferred.

"This is some horseshit," I said aloud, but all sources seem to agree: nerve-racking evokes ones nerves stretched on the medieval torture device The Rack, while nerve-wracking evokes ones nerves wracked and ruined: or wrecked.

One article hinted one was A.P. and one was Chicago Manual of style, and I would hold with A.P. over Chicago, but I think I like the Chicago comma exception. Can't mix styles.

It's odd to me that 'rack' with its dozens of definitions won out over the very specific "wrack," in both the U.S. and England, but okay. I am wrong.

Comments

[KC]

... I like nerve-wracking better, too. But I also like grey rather than gray for most uses - it feels greyer - and I adore the Oxford comma, so I'm never going to find a style guide that I agree with enthusiastically on all points.

(=I also feel like as we age, there are things that were Normative when we were younger which we don't like the newer versions of, but the newer version eventually get encoded in the style guides and that's just one of the Get Off My Lawn aging processes, I think? Slang we like, slang we don't like, grammatical playing we like or don't like, and what we personally like or don't like isn't going to make all that much of a difference, sigh...

("I gifted" instead of "I gave" drives me nuts most places it occurs - I do think there is a legitimate use case for gift as a verb wherever it does provide needed additional context - but not *everywhere*... but I strongly suspect the world is moving along quite comfortably without me.)

[theQueen]

KC - When "alot" becomes a word, then I will riot. (By the way, I just noticed I typed "out a typo" instead of "put a typo" which is a little scary. That wasn't deliberate.) I rely on MSWord to tell me if it is grey or gray.