rain » reign

Chiefly in:   right as reign

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Asked whether he felt he was over his illness that would leave him drained some days but not others, Julian explained “I felt fine on both days but I’ve only been racing for an hour but I think now the season has ended so it’s not a problem now. A few beers and in a month I’ll be right as reign and will be back on the road and training for next year.” (British Cycling)
  • Right as reign, Blair declares (Hellen Kennedy, NY Daily News, article title)

Analyzed or reported by:

Michael Quinion at World Wide Words explains the idiom right as rain.

With the substitution right as reign comes a meaning shift for right: in the original, the sense is all right, in good order, whereas in the eggcorn right sometimes seems to have a meaning approaching to morally justified.

See also rein>reign and the reverse eggcorn reign>rain (rain supreme).

| comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2004/12/24 |

reign » rain

Chiefly in:   rain supreme

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • Dear brothers and Sisters, We must be wondering why there should be suffering when we have come from the center (Ultimate Reality) where bliss rains supreme. God is bliss. He is happiness. He is love. (Sri B.Narasimhulu)
  • While we tend to romanticize the alternative era of the early 90s, Jim and Greg remind us that the mainstream still rained supreme. (link)

The reverse eggcorn rain>reign (as in right as reign) can be found as well. See also rein>reign.

Thanks to Matt Read for pointing out this eggcorn.

| comment | link | entered by Chris, 2004/12/24 |

inclement » inclimate

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • When a day of school is missed because of inclimate weather and school is in session on Friday during that week, then school will be held on Saturday of that week. (Green Forest Schools, Arkansas)
  • The trailer, which was apparently gutted, was only used by a P.E. teacher as a classroom during inclimate or cold weather and for storage of some equipment, Shannon said. (The Progress-Index, 2004/12/17)

Analyzed or reported by:

Inclimate weather is weather that is so bad it doesn’t even count as climate.

| 1 comment | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2004/12/23 |

rein » reign

Chiefly in:   take the reigns of power , free reign , reign in

Classification: English – nearly mainstream

Spotted in the wild:

  • The excesses of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero bled the imperial treasury, as the generals eventually grabbed the reigns of power. (The Moscow News, N 49 2004)
  • Following the 1984 general election, despite a landslide Labour victory, the outgoing National Prime Minister demonstrated a remarkable unwillingness to hand over the reigns of power. (Auckland District Law Society)
  • Free Reign for the Sole Superpower? (Boston Review article title)
  • The Muslim Council of Britain intend to seek immediate clarification from the government that expressions of support for Muslims overseas, such as Palestinians or the Chechens, would not be banned.
    However, Lord Falconer seemed to suggest that the law was being specifically drafted to reign in key individuals. “I think we know who we want to target in relation to this,” he said. (The Sunday Herald, Aug 7, 2005)
  • So eagerly anticipated is the annual game of “who’s minding the shop?” while the prime minister takes his August break, that this year the Sun published a “Prescott countdown” to the dreaded day when the deputy prime minister would take up the reigns of power - and, theoretically, have his finger on the button. (Guardian Unlimited, Matthew Tempest, Aug 13, 2002)
  • And yet we hear little about the aftermath of war in Iraq. Speculation abroad is rife. Will we seize Iraq’s oil fields? To whom do we hand the reigns of power after Saddam Hussein? Will our war result in attacks on Israel? (Guardian Unlimited, Robert Byrd, Feb 18, 2003)
  • As one imam put it to me: “Why has the Muslim community failed in reigning in their own youth and shaping their future? Why have the mosques failed to provide rigorous leadership? We must acknowledge our failure.” (Guardian Unlimited, Madeleine Bunting, July 14, 2005)
  • Born in rural Limpopo, Hlahla took over the reigns at Acsa in November 2001. She has been credited with the successful realigning of the company’s strategic direction, resulting in improved earnings and an accelerated and intensified transformation process. (Independent Online (South Africa), August 03, 2005)
  • Does anyone remember “Professor” Ward Churchill? Yet, each time “we the people” have attempted to pull the reigns in on these seditious individuals, the ACLU has grabbed them from us; only to warn us that if we attempt to stop these terrorists or terrorists-in-the-making, they will sue us. (The Conservative Voice, August 07, 2005)
  • The Roman Empire stood appalled:
    It dropped the reigns of peace and war (William Butler Yeats, lines 13-14 of "Two Songs from a Play", the play being "The Resurrection", 1931)

Analyzed or reported by:

Lee Rudolph contributed the example from Yeats on soc.motss. He explains:

The eggcorn is present in the 1953 fifth printing of the first edition of the 1933 Collected Poems, but not in the 1953 New Edition of the 1934 Collected Plays, and has been corrected without comment in the 1983 Collected Poems: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran, whose stated intention in the preface is “to provide accurate texts”. I don’t know if we can assume it was a printer’s error, but there it is, big as life and twice as natural, and something between 74 and 52 years old.

As horses and carriages have become rare as a means of transport, the metaphor controling or restricting their movement with the help of reins has lost its transparency. The homophone reign, in the sense of the exercise of power, is in the process of supplanting it.

The thoroughness of the re-interpretation in the occurrences of the rein > reign substitution varies. Free reign is entering mainstream usage. Reigns of power, on the other hand, only makes sense superficially; the plural remains unaccounted for.

See also reign»rain (as in rain supreme), rain»reign (as in right as reign) and rein»range .

[Update: 18 October 2007, Ben Zimmer] More about free rei(g)n on OUPblog here and here.

| 3 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2004/12/23 |

defuse » diffuse

Classification: English – nearly mainstream

Spotted in the wild:

  • With the possibility of trouble starting up again, I felt that this was a good way to help diffuse any complications similar to the last time. (in a fan fiction)
  • It’s 2004 and India and Pakistan are at war, both with missiles ready and aimed. The American president and his top advisors must diffuse the situation. (BBC Four)

Analyzed or reported by:

This eggcorn involves a metaphor shift: the problem or situation at hand likened a noxious substance that can be rendered harmless by scattering it about and thereby diluting it, instead of to a bomb that must be defused.

As of 2004/12/23, Google finds 18,400 hits for “diffuse the situation” vs 33,200 for “defuse the situation”. This shows that the eggcorn is entering the mainstream, probably because the underlying analogy appears compelling to many.

| 2 comments | link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2004/12/23 |
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