For centuries, Americans—real Americans—great Americans!—rode horses. But that has changed, and that has changed everything. I refer, of course, of the constant tendency of today’s “writers” to use the word “reign” when the correct word is “rein”, the error popping up in sources as disparate as the first Iron Man—“Tony Takes the Reigns”1—and “What the NYT’s Facebook Investigation Really Tells Us”, by Slate’s Will Oremus—“And it makes far more sense than the notion that Facebook would give other big tech companies free reign to effectively steal the identities and communications of its users.”
Well, I suppose it’s an easy error to make—for a pantywaist who never sat tall in the saddle. But it’s an error that an American—a real American—would never make.
Afterwords
When Ronald Reagan died, someone—and a wise someone at that—said at his funeral that the great man well knew that “there is nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse”, exciting great horror among the pantywaist intelligentsia, who naturally knew nothing about either.2 O mores, O tempores.
1. “Tony” as in Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, aka Robert Downey, Jr.
2. Because riding a horse makes you feel good, dummies! Plus, it lets other people know you’re so goddamn rich you can waste your time and money on a grotesquely extravagant and outmoded form of “transportation”!
