We cancelled our road trip up to Collingwood because of the snow storm. We reckoned it would be reckless, and perhaps not wreckless – if not bringing us to wrack and ruin, at the very least a bit nerve-racking, if you catch my drift. So instead of going in any direction, we played the recluse all weekend.
I’m not trying to snow you under, lexicographically. There’s a sound explanation for all of this, though most of it’s not explained by sound. In fact, while you can right it by writing it, what you hear is neither here nor there: You may notice that you round your lips when saying the wr in wrack and wreck and write, but you also normally round them the same amount when saying rack and reck and rite. That phonetic distinction disappeared centuries ago.
There are five lexical items to reckon with here – yes, five: reckless, wreck, reckon, wrack, and rack. So let’s go backward deliberately, as though reversing to extract ourselves from a drift. You may have noticed I wrote nerve-racking and you may have racked your brains about that: not nerve-wracking?
Well, if you care to be correct, no. Nerve-wracking is used, yes, and has been since the later 1800s – from wrack, as in wrack and ruin, an alternate form of wreck, used for a time (Shakespeare’s life plus and minus half a century) in southern England but otherwise mainly northern – but the older form, by at least half a century, is nerve-racking, from rack meaning ‘stretch’, from the noun rack, originally naming an implement for stretching things… or people.
Indeed, the figurative use of rack for something causing mental or physical anguish has been around since the 1400s. So something that stretches your nerves to the breaking point is, by history, nerve-racking. It just happens that we’ve leaned towards the w version now, and while I’m inclined to think that there’s a feeling of a crumpled piece of paper (perhaps a road map) from the w, the main reasons for the switch may come down more to the stronger semantics of wrack, as in wreck, and also to a prejudice in favour of less phonetic spellings.
Anyway, that’s how I reckon it. By the way, reckon comes from an old Germanic word for calculating. If you’ve ever been to a restaurant in Germany or Austria, you probably know that die Rechnung is the bill, and if Rechnung seems similar to reckoning, it is; they’re parallel descendants of the same original morphemes. So the next question is, does reckless mean ‘without reckoning’?
Surprisingly not. Historically, reckon and reckless come from different roots. Whereas reckon is related to right (and thus also to the same root that shows up in Latin rect words such as correct, direction, and rectify), reck as in reckless is from a root having to do with caring or paying attention to or being troubled by. So, at root, reckless means about the same as insouciant.
And, as I have already implied, wreck is unrelated to either; it has to do with ruin. The w was once pronounced – modern descendants of the same root in Swedish and Danish start with a v (vrak, vrag). But now we write it twice as much (vv —> w) and say it not at all. (Note that in Old English, a different letter form, derived from runes, was used for /w/; it was written ƿ and was called wynn, but it couldn’t win – looked too much like a p – and when the Continental languages said “double you or nothing” we took it.)
So anyway, seeing the results of the weather, we know we made the correct decision. And now you, too, can rectify your lexical directions. We will make it up to Collingwood later, when the weather is right.
Sesquiotica 