"Not* an eggcorn. Right?

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jul 17, 2012, at 8:51 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>
> "… his wife committed suicide. _Wrecked by guilt_, he became estranged
> from his family and began living on the streets."
>
> The idiom is "(w)racked with guilt." But mere deviation from an idiom
> does not an eggcorn make, right? It's hard to tell. The author perhaps
> reached for the idiom, couldn't find it, and went with
> WTF-close-enough-for-government-work.

discussed on the Eggcorn Forum, but not in the ecdb, probably because of the difficulty in teasing apart "wreck", "wrack", and "rack".

still, (w)rack > wreck in "Xed with guilt" does look eggcornish, since it replaces a puzzling piece of the idiom witha piece that actually does make some sense in the context.

now, in "wreck one's brain" for "rack one's brain", this case is harder to make.

the ecdb does have an entry for "wreck havoc" for "wreak havoc":
  http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/164/wreck

i recall discussions of this cluster of spelling variants, but haven't been able to find it (in the ADS-L or Language Log archives).

arnold

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