AOL: Rupert Murdoch Hands Over 'Reigns'

 

Recently, when Rupert Murdoch announced he'd be handing the reins of Fox over to his sons, AOL ran the headline “Rupert Murdoch plans to hand over Fox reigns to sons.”

It prompted a discussion with a fellow editor: Could the AOL headline writers argue that this was not an error? That is, could they really have meant “reigns” instead of “reins”?

Reins, as you surely know, are the parts of a horse’s bridle the rider uses to control the horse. When we talk about “handing over the reins,” it’s a reference to these reins and means to hand over steerage or control.

Reign is often a verb meaning to rule. When someone reigns supreme -- holds the most power anyone can have -- this is the “reign” we mean. Reign can also be a noun. When we refer to a king’s reign, we mean his rule, as in, “King George’s reign over his people was absolute.”

So if you, like AOL, talk about handing one of these two things over, the standard idiom calls for reins. But in theory, you could also hand over your reign. If you reign over something and you hand that off to someone else, technically, that’s what you’re doing.

But did Murdoch hand over “reigns,” plural?  In order to do so, he would need to have more than one reign -- like his reign over Fox Broadcasting and his reign over 20th Century Fox.

But, come on. To me, the focus of the news item was on his reign, singular, over all the subsidiaries of Fox. There was no reason to focus on individual units within the larger organization. So common sense dictates that the word “reins” was required in AOL’s headline. “Reigns,” by any reasonable assessment, was an error.

 

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