Throwing Up My Hands

I bet Heather Havrilesky is a total doll. She seems like she'd be a whole lot of fun to sit down in front of the television with: you could eat ruffled chips with crab dip and drink way too much cola and snark about the programming, which is what makes her perfect to be Salon's television critic.

But then I run across something like this and I just shake my head in sorrow:

The trouble with "The Apprentice" is that even if you had a bunch of smart, cool people on the show, they'd still be limited to inventing ways to promote Sam's Club or dreaming up jingles for Arby's new chicken sandwich. Jesus, how about last week's product, the P'EatZZa, a name so asinine even that whoring slutmonkey Donald Trump couldn't say it without choking on his own tongue? Basically, since only three of you know what I'm talking about, it was a sandwich that consisted of -- brace yourself -- two slices of cold pizza with lunchmeat in between. Just watching the yuppie ass-kissers on the show trying to choke back these awful congealed-looking things and then proclaiming them delicious was enough to make you wretch.

No, Heather! No! Bad Heather! And bad nonexistent Salon editors, too! You're watching too much television and not reading enough!

"Wretch" is a native English word which means "someone in a state of misery or degradation"; it's intimately related to "wreck", which makes perfect sense when you learn that an earlier definition--it's originally from Old English--of "wretch" was "exile". "Retch", on the other hand, has nothing to do with exiles or flotsam or degradation: it simply means "to vomit", or "to almost vomit", or "to attempt to vomit". It's entirely unrelated to "wretch", though it, too, comes to us from Old English (from "hraecan", "to clear the throat", "hock up phlegm"); in this case, though, it might well be onomatopoetic, but it's also related to "reach".

Why isn't there someone at Salon to tell Heather Havrilesky this?