Legal Writing

Heart-rending and Gut-wrenching

By Maeve Maddox

Although widely used by a great many speakers, an expression that makes me cringe is “heart-wrenching.”

Gut-wrenching is fine. Guts twist, both literally and figuratively. And in the bad old days people had their innards pulled out as a form of torture and execution, hence the verb to disembowel and the expression to draw and quarter.

To me, something described as “gut-wrenching” is frightening, the way it’s used in this reader’s comment:

In a mystery the reader is trying to figure out what is going on and the puzzle is more of a brain teaser, but not a gut-wrenching life and death struggle.

“Heart-wrenching,” on the other hand, always strikes my ears as mistake for heart-rending.

I suppose that an argument could be made for either heart-rending or “heart-wrenching,” but it seems to me that when someone says, “The sight of the displaced earthquake victims was heart-rending,” the emotion felt is probably more gentle than the violent word wrench would suggest.

wrench: trans. To twist or turn (a thing) forcibly or with effort; to jerk or pull with a violent twist

A strong argument against “heart-wrenching” is that neither the OED nor Merriam-Webster includes it, while both the British and American dictionaries have entries for heart-rending/heartrending.

OED:
heart-rending: That rends the heart; terribly distressing. So heart-rending vbl. n., terrible distress, pangs of anguish; ?heart-rendingly adv.

Merriam-Webster:
heartrending: causing intense grief, anguish, or pain

I suggest reserving wrenching attached to gut for things that cause fear, and rending with heart to describe emotional pain caused by the sight of something truly piteous.

Full post as published by Daily Writing Tips on October 20, 2010 (boomark / email).