Wracking my Brain
February 9, 2008
I was wracking my brain for a subject for this post, when I thought of the term ‘wracking my brains’ — I have heard that so often, I thought it was more common the singular form I used in the title. But really, on introspection, I’m fairly certain I have only one, so it should be singular.
Which is more common? Well, big brother Google will tell us, if we ask nicely. The phrase ‘wracking my brain’ returns 55,300 results, while the plural form ‘wracking my brains’ returns only 16,000 results. So of 71,300 writers, 77.5% agree that the singular form is correct. That still leaves 22.5% who think the plural form is better — I guess those are double-brained folks.
This trivial exercise has its lesson though — semantic analysis of Google results can tell us a lot about how people really use the language. Even with the ready availability of spell-checkers, lots of words get misspelled on web pages. Take the common word abilities, for example: it is often misspelled abilties. How often? Google says: abilities 56,600,000 abilties 84,700. Only about 0.15% of the time is this word misspelled. Much less than one percent. Guess that puts our 22% usage of brains into perspective, doesn’t it?
