Free Reign vs. Free Rein

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is David in Glen Arbor, Michigan. I have a question for you.

All right.

My secretary was fixing to go on vacation a few weeks ago, and there were a couple projects we needed to get done. So I asked her as she was packing everything up if I just had free reign to do whatever I wanted to do vis-a-vis digging around in her desk.

And she, of course, said no, she’d kill me if I touched her desk. But we began to wonder about the phrase free reign. And if she had been willing to grant me free reign, what she would have granted? Like R-E-I-N that you’d give a horse? Or R-E-I-G-N that an emperor would take?

You’d be the king of the desk, huh?

Yeah, you know. Somebody else said they really actually thought it was R-A-I-N, referring they thought it was from out in the Dakotas or the Great Plains or someplace, referring to just, you know, rain falling.

Oh, wow. That’s creative.

Yeah. And there was one other suggestion, which was from sort of a corruption of free range with a G, and somewhere the G dropped out of it. We vetoed that. We didn’t think that was a very good suggestion.

But nevertheless, if she had, in fact, been willing to grant me free reign, what would she have given me?

It sounds like you work in a really fun place.

Yeah, well, we’re nuts. But obviously, we survived her vacation and nobody touched her desk.

Good, good. Business is still operating as usual.

You’ve got the right answer in there somewhere, and it’s the first one, isn’t it, Martha?

Yeah, yeah, free rein as in horses.

It’s horses.

Yeah. If you give them free rein, you’re letting go, and you’re letting the horse have its head and do what it wants and go where it goes at the speed that it wants.

Aha.

Yeah, so that’s R-E-I-N. And David, have you guys heard around your office the story of the king and the wild animals?

Can I tell this one really quickly if you haven’t?

Oh, well, I have not.

Okay, so there was this king, and he loved wild animals. He loved all kinds of game, deer, pheasant, little wild bunnies, and he collected them and collected them and collected them. And for a while his subjects tolerated this, but it got really smelly in the castle because he kept collecting all these wild animals.

Okay. Do you see where I’m going here?

And so his loyal subjects finally became disloyal, and they forced the king to abdicate because of all these animals. And this was the first time in history that the rain was called on account of game.

Oh, terrible.

Terrible! Seriously, that’s bad. I thought maybe you wanted to tell that around the office.

But it fits.

Right, it fits. It would be the second choice. That’d be the one with the G.

I think this is the first time I ever broke a rib from groaning.

I don’t know. They sounded like the kind of colleagues who would enjoy that kind of story.

They probably, they no doubt will.

Yeah. Maybe not.

So anyway, free reign has to do with horses and not with kings and emperors.

There you go. Now we know.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Yeah, but that’s how a lot of questions come to us, right? You say something, it comes out of your mouth, and you’re like, whoa, wait a second. I’ve never really thought about what’s coming out of my mouth. What really does that mean? Where does it come from? Is it okay to say it? And what’s the history behind that?

Yeah, it’s great, isn’t it?

Mm—

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