Dear Geist,

Am I racking or wracking my brains? Same goes for my nerves.

—Dana Webster, Chicago Ill

Dear Dana,

The term rack comes from the torture device, so when you rack your brains, you stretch them hard. To wrack, as in wrack and ruin, is to destroy. But the boundaries separating wrack, rack and wreck are increasingly fuzzy: they sound similar, so there is some seepage. As Bryan Garner notes in Garner's Modern American Usage, this kind of word evolution used to take a century to become widespread, but in the age of instant everything, some points of language and usage can change within hours.

—The Editors