On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:49 PM, Eric Wald <[email protected]> wrote: > Daniel C. wrote: >> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 8:31 PM, Eric Wald <[email protected]> wrote: >>> No, "racking" is correct in this case. I'd have thought the opposite >>> before researching the issue, though: >>> >>> http://www.grammarist.com/usage-errors/homophone-confusion/rack-vs-wrack/ >>> >>> Turns out that I would have spelt "nerve-racking" wrong, too. >> >> ...good sir, I am both indebted to and impressed by you. > > Lest I misrepresent myself, I am not affiliated with the Grammarist. > My "research" was limited to several minutes on a search engine; the > linked article was simply the clearest summary of information that was > also available in dictionaries and other sources. > > Curiously, it was written a mere two months ago. How often has > something like it been written before, and how often will it be written > again? Surely not as often as its/it's and there/their/they're > clarification and rant articles, but I could be surprised...
The term 'eggcorn' has been coined by the linguists at languagelog for the phenomenon that leads to replacement of a word in a phrase with a similar-sounding word that still makes some kind of sense, or maybe even more sense if the original phrase used an archaic term. If you go to the languagelog page and do a search for eggcorn, you'll find all sorts of these kinds of things and linguistic research related to them. Interesting stuff. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
