I have written about the confusion between “rein in” and “reign in” recently, but last weekend we had an unusual instance where getting it wrong completely changed our intended meaning. We wrote that Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s departing chief strategist, said that staff at the State and Defence departments opposed his waging economic war with China because “they wanted China’s help to reign in Pyongyang”.
Richard Hanson-James wrote to alert us to this “chilling homophone”, which seemed to suggest that the US wanted to rule North Korea. We meant that US officials were seeking China’s help to “rein in” the North Korean regime – that is, to hold it in check, a metaphor from using the reins to hold back a horse.
Pull apart: Another reader wrote to say that we often confuse “detract from” and “distract from”, which we may do, but not in the example he gave. We wrote about recent controversies about Donald Trump, and said “all of which have appeared to distract from his policy agenda”.
I would say “detract” means to take away from, whereas here we were saying that either President Trump or the American people had their attention drawn away from his policy agenda by the controversies. There isn’t much difference in meaning, if you think about it, and things become even less clear if you chase down the etymology of the two words, which are both from Latin trahere, to pull, drag. Detract meant “drawn away” whereas distract meant “pull apart”, or “pull in different directions”.
In fact, I thought “distract from” was the only thing that was right about this part-sentence. “Appeared to” seemed a bit feeble: either people were distracted or they weren’t. As for “policy agenda”, the less said the better.
Are we nearly there yet? We described Ripoll, the Spanish town where the imam believed to have inspired the terrorist attacks was based, as being “around 62 miles from Barcelona”. Thanks to Philip Nalpanis for pointing out this example of spurious precision. We had presumably seen a report describing Ripoll as about 100km from Barcelona, and converted 100km to 62 miles. However, according to Google Maps, the distance is 109km, which is 68 miles. So we could have said “around 70 miles from Barcelona”.
Expertese: My attempt to ban the word “expert” from headlines has not been wholly successful. The most redundant example this week: “Do not boil your underwear in hotel kettles, warns expert.”
