Not Really About the Mohawk Valley

As I wracked my brains for blog post ideas, I realized a few things.

One is that I don’t know exactly what the expression rack one’s brains means, where it came from or even how it’s spelled. Is it rack one’s brains, as in put the brain on a rack and stretch, torturing it till ideas come out? Or is it wrack? The only time I racall hearing wrack used in a sentence is in the last act of MacBeth. MacBeth knows his comeuppance has come and decides to go down fighting. “Blow wind! Come wrack! At least we’ll die with harness on our back!” I may be remembering it wrong. Tenth grade English was a long time ago.

The other thing I realized is that this blog blank (see, I don’t get Writer’s Block, I get Writer’s Blank, but that’s a whole other subject) may continue as long as I keep getting overtime. Less time and energy for Mohawk Valley fun. Good for the bank account, bad for the blog.

A few ideas did occur to me, but once I had flown off on the rack/wrack tangent, I felt a little silly going into them. What would the headline read? A little Mohawk Valley after some really silly musings? But never mind that, what about rack and wrack?

I looked in the dictionary. It’s rack one’s brains, as in “to strain to the utmost” (The American Heritage Dictionary, third edition, Houghton-Mifflin Co., NY, 1992). Wrack means wreckage, violent destruction, or to cause these things (ibid). Well my brain is in a shambles after all that (and especially after trying to remember how to do proper footnotes; I bet I got them wrong).

So the brilliant or otherwise ideas I came up with will do for tomorrow or the next day. I haven’t written about the Mohawk Valley, but I’ve managed to amuse myself, so at least somebody is happy.