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.

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).