Ring Me After You’ve Been Put Through The Wringer

It’s not pleasant to be put through the wringer, a common metaphor for a draining experience. It’s also not pleasant to see that spelled incorrectly as put through the ringer.

Picture: Getty Images/Fox Photos

The wringer in question is a mangle: essentially a pair of hand-operated rollers which wet laundry could be pushed through to squeeze out the excess water. Before the widespread user of clothes dryers, wringing your clothes through a mangle was the only option for speeding up drying (other than relying on the sun).

Wringers are largely unknown now, but that doesn’t mean that using the more frequently-encountered ringer is correct. Ringers belong with phones, not with laundry equipment. So learn the right version and use it. Accuracy matters. Hat tip: KiloOscarZulu

Lifehacker’s Mind Your Language column offers bossy advice on improving your writing.


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments