The Day After Tomorrow

[a promise kept]

Now, where was I? Where was I?

Oh, yes.

It all started with someone’s asking me the other day whether the correct form is “nerve-racking” or “nerve-wracking.”

They’re both correct, I asserted, because they both in fact are correct, and I added that the -racking form is perennially more popular than the -wracking form—because it in fact is, as you can see in this handy chart:

They mean the same thing, too, though I suppose that one might make the argument that the -wracking version (think of “wrack and ruin”) implies more utter and complete destruction than the simply torturous¹ -racking version (think of “rack my brain,” and did you know that “rack” comes from the Middle Dutch “rekken,” meaning “to stretch”? well, it does!)²

That said, there are other similar-looking word pairs that are not quite so interchangeable,³ and that’s what I meant to write about yesterday before I got distracted with thoughts about the Gershwins, The Bear, and Ernest Thesiger. (See “Have a Potato.”)

Back to business, then.⁴

My perpetual nemeses are “continuously” and “continually,” because try as I might—and no matter the many helpful mnemonic devices I’ve been offered that are of no use to me because, King Philip Came Over From Green Scotland⁵ aside, I’m unable to recall mnemonic devices⁶—I can’t remember which is which. So I look up “continuously” and “continually” every single time I’m presented with either to remind myself that one means “without interruption” and the other means “at regular intervals.”

Right, yeah, but which is which?

Let’s ask our friends at Merriam-Webster, who have this to say:

Since the mid-19th century, many grammarians have drawn a distinction between continual and continuous. Continual should only mean “occurring at regular intervals,” they insist, whereas continuous should be used to mean “continuing without interruption.” This distinction overlooks the fact that continual is the older word and was used with both meanings for centuries before continuous appeared on the scene. Today, continual is the more likely of the two to mean “recurring,” but it also continues to be used, as it has been since the 14th century, with the meaning “continuing without interruption.

And this, my Substack friends, is why God invented the words “regularly,” “occasionally,” “intermittently,” “ceaselessly,” and all sorts of other crisply unambiguous modifiers.

Use ’em.⁷

Marginally less confusing, perhaps, are “flounder” and “founder,” the former meaning “struggle to move” and the latter meaning “sink like a g.d. stone.” Does it help to remember that floundering precedes foundering and that “flounder” alphabetically precedes “founder”? I dunno, I just made that up, and I’m pretty impressed with myself right now.

I find myself less mystified trying to distinguish between the verbs “career” and “careen” mostly because I couldn’t, if you held a gun to my head, tell you what either of them means, so it’s straight to the dictionary every time to learn, and learn, and relearn, that to career is “to go at top speed in a headlong manner” (thank you again, M-W) and to careen is . . . Well, it’s a few things, including to lurch and to heel over (like a boat; why is everything today about boats?).

And that’s as good a place as any to stop researching “career” and “careen,” because if you continue for another five seconds you’re going to find out that, as far as a lot of learnèd people are concerned, they’re . . . sigh . . . interchangeable.

“Then you career,” as that great American lyricist Stephen Sondheim put it, “from career to career.”

Ladles and germsicles, Miss Yvonne De Carlo.⁸

“First,” as that great American lyricist Stephen Sondheim also noted, “you’re another sloe-eyed vamp, then someone’s mother, then you’re camp,” and if that’s not someone’s entire career (ding ding ding: career) summed up in less than a dozen words, I don’t know what is.⁹

By the way, if it never occurred to you look up “sloe-eyed,” and I confess that it hadn’t occurred to me till about an hour ago, it means “having dark, usually almond-shaped eyes.”¹⁰ It is not, I’m happy to report, related to the “sloe” in “sloe gin,” that particular “sloe” taking in the fruits of the blackthorn plant, which are called “sloes.” (I also hadn’t looked that up till about an hour ago.)¹¹

And with that:

See you next week. Happy Fourth!

Benjamin

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Department of TCB

There are now slightly north of five thousand of you signed on for this little adventure of mine, and I’m delighted to have each and every one of you aboard.¹² I’m particularly grateful to everyone who has, to date, contributed financially in larger or smaller ways to this endeavor, and if there’s a part of you that’s thinking “You know what? I like this guy” and you want to join that contributing crew, I will be, of course, eternally (or at least monthly or annually) in your debt.

1. [Post-publication addendum: I suppose that I might well have registered/explained the difference between “torturous” and “tortuous,” but it eluded me in the moment. For the record: “torturous” concerns torture, and “tortuous” simply means twisty and turny, like a path or a great thriller.]

2. As much as I’m content to make my livelihood as the village explainer,* and though an extensive tangent on “wrack” and “wreak” and “rack” and “wreck” is tempting, we can’t cover everything every time, and I do trust the more enthusiastically curious rabbit-holers among you to get some googling done and learn things for yourselves, making good use of the helpful search words “definition,” “etymology,” and “Merriam.”

Though, as long as we’re down here, I’m always happy to note that the past tense of “wreak” is, quite simply, “wreaked,” and that “wrought,” as in iron and what-hath-God, is an archaic past tense of the verb “to work.” And, yes, “wrought” is related to “wright,” as in “wheelwright” and “playwright.” Happy further googling to you!

*From The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: “We met Ezra Pound at Grace Lounsbery’s house, he came to dinner with us and he stayed and he talked about japanese prints among other things. Gertrude Stein liked him but did not find him amusing. She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”

3. Similar-sounding as well, or even identically so, but today is not a day about distinguishing between homophones like “lead” and “led” or “reign” and “rein.” (A thirty-seven-second pause ensues here in which I try and fail miserably to come up with a clever “Reign, rein, go away” joke.)

4. [Post-publication addendum: I just, too late, realized that I missed a grand opportunity to title this little essay “Prickly Pairs.” I’m full of regret.]

5. Kingdom phylum class order family genus species. Yup, I still got it.

6. How’s that for irony?

7. When I want to write something like “Use ’em” (with an apostrophe, which is correct), rather than “Use ‘em” (with a single open-quote mark, which is incorrect), my little trick is to type x’em and then delete/backspace over the x, leaving me with that lovely standalone ’em. Others have other methods.

8. Some of you don’t need this footnote, some of you do, and there’s no shame in either, as it were, camp. Yvonne De Carlo originated the role of Carlotta Campion in the 1971 stage musical Follies, in which she introduced the song “I’m Still Here,” which notably includes that delightful career/career/career line. If you are of a certain age and not necessarily a stage musical kind of person, you might better recognize Ms. De Carlo as Lily Munster.

9. I fear that if I add a note asserting that “carom”—as, in billiards, when “an object ball strikes another ball before falling into a pocket”—has no etymological relationship to “career” and “careen,” I’ll immediately be proven wrong, so I’m not asserting it.

10. This is where dictionaries tend to skate right up to the word “slanted,” but let’s avoid that thin ice, shall we.

11. [Post-publication addendum: I have never been so happy to stand corrected. Alert and learnèd reader Pamela Capraru notes:

“Sloe eyed” may well connect to the blackthorn fruit after all. A wander through the hedgerows and down the rabbit hole leads to “slew-eyed, 1. : having soft dark bluish or purplish black eyes. 2. : having slanted eyes.” Said fruit is indeed dark blue to purplish black.

[So it seems that I was so distracted by issues of shape that I neglected to keep my eye on the less complicated ball: color. Also, it seems that the word “sloe” makes its way to English via German and Russian words meaning “plum,” and the Russian “sliva” (as in slivovitz, da?) is a cousin of “livid” in the sense of black-and-blue, and down, down, down the rabbit hole we go. Wow.

[Which still doesn’t quite answer the question of the shape aspect of “sloe-eyed,” but perhaps someone will weigh in wisely about that as well.]

12. Again with the boats?