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Chris -- 2018-04-11
This feels like an alteration of ‘ring true’, possibly influenced by ‘remain true’ and shifting towards the sense “prevail, be dominant” that ‘reign’ has. It doesn’t quite make literal sense with respect to ideas: you could say a dominant idea reigns, but it’s redundant to add ‘true’.
Examples pulled from the Web:
The old saying, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” continues to reign true, and more so than ever in today’s technology-driven society.
Long may that reign true.
Doesn’t the inverse square law for the attenuation only reign true in a vacuum??
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Welcome to the forum, Oikolukija. This is an interesting find—it makes a certain sense. People have noted before a certain degree of interchangeability between reign/rein/rain/ring, so I decided to look for “rains true.” Sure enough—over 400 hits for the phrase, and dozens of those seem to be our target phrase. I wonder whether the phrase “right as rain” is exerting some influence here, but it’s possible this is just a misspelling of “reign.” Not sure. Examples:
However, I think Swofford’s final message rains true that regardless of the time or environment: “Every war is different, every war is the same”.
http://www.abc.net.au/southeastsa/stories/s1595666.htm
It rains true about many aspects of modem day ideology.
http://www.abc.net.au/southeastsa/stories/s1649605.htm
[This and the example before it are from different pages, but they were both written by the same correspondent at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.]
His quote rains true since quite a percentage of evangelical Christian sectors call any group of people, who differ from their beliefs, a “cult”.
http://www.nowpublic.com/mass_suicide_n … _gate_cult
As sad as it is the old saying still rains true any publicity is good publicity.
http://www.sherdog.net/forums/showthread.php?t=597915
After the week we’ve just experienced, let’s hope that saying rains true for the stock market in May.
http://www.thekirkreport.com/2004/05/ap … ers_b.html
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