linguistic nitpick time
You know … a lot of people complain about the oh-so-common mix-ups in things like “their/they’re/there” “its/it’s” “then/than” “who’s/whose” and the ilk.
But those usually show up in relatively informal media, or in the usage patterns of people who don’t (and probably never will) make their livings writing.
One of the things that really cheeses me off is malformed idioms.
Just recently, I was reading a news article on securityfocus. There, in the middle of the page, glaring at me, was the sentence “The attempts to reign in the information, however, have failed spectacularly.”
Now, I don’t claim to be perfect or anything. I’ve known the joys of comma-splices and word-misuses and broken parallelism, and I’m quite familiar with the dance of “does it go in the quotation marks or outside of them”, and have had many a misstep there. But I’ve seen this shit EVERYWHERE. I mean … seriously, everywhere.
Professional journalists are writing news stories using “reign in” because they apparently forgot what the phrase actually means or where it comes from. Along with it, they apparently forgot what the word “rein” is entirely, and how it’s used. The construct “free reign” abounds too.
To quote a gentleman and scholar (and D-O-double-G), “Now this types of shit happens all the time”. I’m not sure if I’m just seeing it more now than before, or if it’s getting progressively worse, but more and more news stories are becoming less news stories and more blog posts. There’s a serious lack of a sense of literary flair to the vast majority of journalism these days, and it’s pretty damned irritating.
I mean … whatever happened to the proofreaders in the process? Has journalism seriously just discarded all of its quality editors, replacing them with people who have entirely too much to scribble a green checkmark on and send off to the electronic presses?
Now, in fairness, a site search on abcnews for the term “reign” gives happy results: not one obvious misuse until page 4, and the obvious misuse is a local story, so not subject to their normal editors. However, abcnews tends to be an exception to internet journalism. foxnews.com and cnn.com have mainline bad cases, and I don’t even want to check any further (but google’s site: directive and searching for “reign in” or “free reign” might result in some informative examples).
Why can’t people write these days? Is it a matter of writing being too accessible? Has the ability to communicate in written language become so cheap that anyone with two index fingers and a keyboard feels nearly obligated to take a fair shot at it? Is this the byproduct of the Internet, or merely the byproduct of poor education and limited cognitive capacity and vocabulary?
August 1st, 2005 at 1:12 pm
“These days”? In comparison to what? I’m sure these sorts of things have always existed. As long as we’ve had standard English spellings (which hasn’t been that long) people have made mistakes.
The only time “rein” is used in English for the common person is in expressions directly relating to horseback riding (which is pretty rare in itself). “Reign” however has much more presence, mainly thanks to studying history and the overall weight of the word. The problem is that both “rein” and “reign” mean something related to control. “Free reign” makes as much sense as the meaning because it implies you have free control over yourself or your area or what have you, while “free rein” is essentially a rider’s idiom that worked its way into our common expressions but nobody remembers the meaning of. There’s tons of idioms that you or I probably understand the meaning but not the literal meaning of, either (although I always find it fun to learn the meaning).
August 2nd, 2005 at 9:26 am
yeah, “free rein” means keeping the reins loose, and letting the horse run as fast as it wants. “Free reign” admittedly means something similar (unchecked authority), but only makes sense superficially. People to whom the term “reign” applies (kings, emperors, dictators) have historically HAD unchecked authority, making “free reign” a horrible exercise in redundancy. But, to people who have only the vaguest superficial grasp of their langauge, it sounds the same, so it’s good enough.
And the use of the term “reign in” instead of “rein in” makes NO sense. Not even superficially. It’s a blatant misspelling, or a broken construct.
One of my long-standing goals has been mastery of my native language. There are very few expressions that I use without fully understanding. I try to choose my words carefully (not that I always succeed), which forces me to think about word origins and phrase meanings a bit more.
And before we had mass-produced cars, nearly everyone was a rider. If you couldn’t ride a horse, you could still drive cattle, or drive a wagon. Only aristocratic women lacked experience handling horses and cattle, which is pretty much how riding expressions made it into common usage.
I think what really appalls me is not the existence of this misuse, but the fact that people who purport to be professional journalists don’t have the basic grasp of the terms they bandy about, and neither do their editors. I can understand informal writing — forum-chatter, irc, bloggers, and email — misusing language. But, professional columnists should take their use of language a little more seriously, in my opinion.
Interestingly, this particular medium apparently accepts community-driven corrections (yeah, the anonymous comment at the bottom of the article was me, and they quietly applied the correction). Maybe the difference here is that in hard print, more care has to be taken with a “final” product, as the final product IS final. With the internet, there’s always the ability to go and delete that extra character, or the erroneous paragraph there. Final is never final, there’s always version 1.01 and 1.02. There’s always the fansub v2 and v3. There’s always the ability to go back and correct your mistakes, or to decide that they’re not worth correcting for the limited audience that might notice or care.