Gramer Girl here, I'm Minyan Fagrity.

This week I have a quick and dirty tip about the difference between reaked and wrought.

Another quick and dirty tip about the word crescendo, and a meaty middle pondering whether

it's likely we could ever understand aliens.

A reader named Martha wondered about the difference between reaked and wrought.

Have you reaked havoc or wrought havoc?

First, let's think about havoc.

You can reek devastation or revenge, but most often it seems people in storms are described

as reeking havoc.

What is this havoc?

Well, originally someone in the army would cry havoc, literally call out the word havoc,

to give soldiers the order to start pillaging and just generally causing chaos.

Havoc!

It appears, for example, in Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar.

Caesar's spirit shall, with a monarch's voice, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

It's not entirely clear no credible source seems certain of the origin, but the word havoc

might come from a Latin word that meant to have or possess, which kind of fits with the

idea of soldiers running around grabbing things.

Later, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, play havoc and make havoc became phrases,

and then even later work havoc showed up.

And the phrases came to have more of a general sense of destruction and chaos separate from

a pillaging army.

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