| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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Page 130
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| chapter with a quote from the Bible, but the percentage rises to 53 when the source of the quotation is less serious: He lightened up his talk by throwing in quotes from Marx Brothers movies. | 1 |
| People sometimes use quote as a synonym for “dictum, saying,” as in His career is just one more validation of Andy Warhol’s quote that “in the future, everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes.” The Usage Panel has little liking for this usage. Seventy-six percent find it unacceptable. | 2 |
rack / wrack
| | If you are racked with doubt about this pair, you are not alone. There are seven words spelled rack in English. Two of these are variants of words spelled wrack. The rack we are immediately concerned with is familiar as a frame for holding or displaying things: a hat rack. This rack also refers to an implement of torture, consisting of a frame on which the body is stretched. From this has come the figurative meaning “pain or torment.” In addition, rack can function as a verb, which means “to torture on a rack” and more commonly “to cause physical or mental suffering to,” as in For weeks after the accident he was racked with pain. It is the verb that gives us torment today. It often appears in the compound nerve-racking and in the idiom rack one’s brains. | 3 |
| On to wrack, of which, we noted, there are two. One means “destruction or ruin” and is familiar in the phrase wrack and ruin. The second wrack refers to wreckage cast ashore, but it is also a verb meaning “to cause the ruin of, wreck.” Thus a business can be wracked by stiff competition. Both of these wrack s have rack as an acceptable spelling variant, so a business can also be racked by competition, and the reader can never be sure if the business is in a state of metaphorical torment or if it is ruined—and in truth it may be both. | 4 |
| You can see how easy it is to mix these words up. If you want to avoid making a wreck of things, remember that the word rack, synonymous with pain, does not normally have wrack as a variant. | 5 |
rather
| | See
rather under Grammar. | 6 |
regard / respect
| | If you are looking for another way to say “with reference to,” look no further. Regard offers several variations: regarding, in regard to, with regard to, and as regards. All of these expressions are standard. The plural phrase in regards to, however, is not normally used in Standard English. | 7 |
| If these choices don’t quite suit you, try respect, which offers in respect to and with respect to. There is also in respect of, but this is primarily used by British speakers. You may have also heard the preposition respecting, but this is not a standard usage. | 8 |
| If you still are not satisfied, try about, concerning, or on. | 9 |
repulse / repel
| | “From where Yocke stood he could see that the left side of the vehicle’s interior was covered with blood and tissue. Sights like this used to repulse him, but not now.” If this quotation from Stephen Coonts’s Under Siege gives you the jitters, it is probably not because of his choice of verbs. | 10 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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