Wreck havoc

[Jonathan Lighter]

My impressionistic impression is that TV news people, the "younger" ones anyway, have been saying "wreck havoc" almost exclusively for a dozen years or more. Probably lots more. Don't know how they spell it, though.

The past tense is almost without exception "wrecked havoc."

JL

Chris Waigl <cwaigl at FREE.FR> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Chris Waigl
Subject: Re: Wreck havoc
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Chris Waigl wrote:

>If I search for "wreaked | wreaked | wreaking | wreaks havoc" (with the
>quotation marks, on google.com, on whichever server I am sent to from
>Europe), 100 results per page, skip to the last page (i.e. click on page
>10), Google indicates a count of 1,630,000. This is still at least ~30%
>too high (page 10 is in fact page 8, with only about 10 results: the
>remaining 290 hits out of the 1000 Google displays at most are spam
>pages, filled with words drawn from dictionaries and other pseudo-text;
>their frequency can be expected to rise in the pages that aren't
>displayed, since Google sorts by pertinence).
>
>Similarly, "wreaked | wreaked | wreaking | wreaks havoc" gets you
>
>
First, this should read "wreck...", and second I see what was wrong with
my searches. I get roughly the same numbers as you do, now (minus the
~30% at least, from spam). But my point about the lack of reliable
searches stands.

Chris Waigl


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