AP Style - clarifies 'nerve-wracking'
It's always been a bit unclear from the AP stylebook whether the phrase should be "nerve-racking" or "nerve-wracking."
The "-racking" form is favored by Bryan Garner in Garner's Modern American Usage, for instance. And AP seemed to indicate it favored that with its general wording:
The noun rack applies to various types of framework; the verb rack means to arrange on a rack, to torture, trouble or torment: He was placed on the rack. She racked her brain.Paul Brians also used this logic in his entry favoring "rack."
If you are racked with pain or you feel nerve-racked, you are feeling as if you were being stretched on that Medieval instrument of torture, the rack. ...
However, the wire service has now put out a clarifying note:
The noun wrack means ruin or destruction, and generally is confined to the phrase wrack and ruin and wracked with doubt (or pain). Also, nerve-wracking.So you are now faced with what seems to be an increasingly prevalent conundrum - go with AP or follow the other sources. AP gives no reason for why it seems to favor the "wracking" construction.
4 Comments:
Doug Fisher, a great source of AP Style information.
Now I have a headache it's Nerve-w(racking) trying to figure out which version to use.
Since wracking makes more sense, people will use the one that makes least sense.
maybe i'm old (ok, i'm old) but the english language is changing in front of my very eyes, and not in a good way. people misspell things, esp. on the internet, and they pass into common usage. i hate it. i guess that's how the language has always evolved however.
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