Three little verbs.

This was another busy week for your favorite freelance editor. (I mean me, although you may actually have another freelance editor in your life whom you prefer. You know what? I'm sorry I brought it up.) As such, all I could think about when thinking of today's topic was Words.

But that's okay, because I have also come across a few more misused words about which I'd like to write. If I can help you, the reader, avoid common mistakes, that will help you feel all superior to everyone else. As indeed you should. And that will make you happy inside.

Me, bringing you joy.

These are three little verbs, or actually three little pairs of verbs, that constantly get bollixed up.

1) hock / hawk

As verbs, both hock and hawk are about selling. Hock comes from a Dutch word for prison, though: hok. To hock something is to pawn it, to (I guess) put it in "prison" as security for a loan. Hawk, as in selling wares, comes from the German hōken, to peddle. You might hock Grandpa's Rolex watch to buy booze, but you'd hawk fake Rolex watches on 10th Avenue. Most of us know the difference, but a writer on Cracked used hock for hawk the other day, leading me to think that Millennials need instruction in this, as in so many things.

2) wangle / wrangle

This one's even closer -- both wangle and wrangle have a sense of wresting something with effort. And in fact Merriam-Webster's allows wrangle (dispute or argue) as a transitive verb to be a synonym for wangle (to obtain or fight by devious means). But I think they've given in on it because so many people don't even know wangle is a word. Wrangle comes from ringan, German for struggle (as in wring), but no one knows for sure where wangle comes from. Basically wrangle is to fight, wangle is to snag. You wrangle with your mother-in-law but wangle a loan out of your father-in-law. Now, if your mother-in-law is a cow, you might wrangle her, but the sense of wrangle as in herding livestock is a back formation from wrangler and is just confusing our issue at hand.

3) rack / wrack

And this is the worst of all, because everyone puts the W on rack when they're racking their brains to remember how to spell it. To wrack is to wreck, which is pretty easy since they are similarly spelled; they both come from the Germanic wrekan, to drive out. Wrack is also a noun, as in Wrack & Ruin, the act that killed vaudeville. But rack comes from Old English reccan, to stretch, as in that torture device you're imagining your brain on. You're trying to stretch your brain when you're thinking hard, not trying to wreck your brain. Well, maybe you are, but I don't dare; there'll be nothing left.

Bonus verb reminder! In the 1949 film A Letter to Three Wives, Kirk Douglas -- V-shaped athletic build, button chin, thick hair -- plays an English teacher, because don't all schoolteachers look like that? Early on in the picture he corrects someone who says she feels badly, telling her that she actually feels bad; you feel badly using your fingers. It's a bugaboo for the character, as he expresses later in the film here:

I've never forgotten since seeing the film that when you're sympathetic for someone, you feel bad (adjective) not badly (adverb). Who says you can learn nothing from movies?