More than ten thousand visitors are expected to attend this week's Racking World Celebration that begins today in Decatur, Alabama. We're joining in the fun of opening day with a look at some of the various racks in our language.
The racking going on in Decatur names one of two specific movements for horses. The rack is "either a two-beat or a four-beat gait in which each beat falls in rapid succession, in perfect cadence and evenly spaced." When a horse racks, his or her legs on either side move together, with the hind leg striking the ground slightly before the foreleg. Racking looks a bit like rocking, and the equine rack is believed to have been coined as an alteration of the verb rock.
Our second rack, the one naming "a wind-driven mass of high, often broken clouds" (or that describes flying or scudding in high wind) is probably related to several Scandinavian terms meaning wreck. Our third rack, synonymous with drawing off wine from the lees, has an ancestor in an Old Provencal name for the stems and husks of pressed grapes.
The rack that means destruction and that appears in the phrase "rack and ruin" is an alteration of an older "wrack."
And what about the famous rack of medieval torture? That rack—like the rack and pinion of cars and the rack that holds fodder for livestock, the rack that names a pair of antlers, and the rack used in billiards—is believed to come from a Middle Dutch word for framework.