Reign, go away? Rein, go away? Rain, go away?

Those are more common if one one is new to the vagaries of the English language. But there are also little trickier ones. . .

--You know, using "past" when you mean "passed," for example the time to fix it has passed." Fixing it should have been done in the "past." That which passed you by is now inevitably locked in the past. (Unless you travel in time -- say fixing things. But that is a story not "passed" or "past.")

Sometimes when I rush through something I am writing, I might use one of the above wrongly, not even thinking about it. Yes, that is one of the struggles with my mother tongue, the spelling of words that seem to flow from the mind effortlessly and are wrongly stabbed to the page, the screen, to the sentence.

Your "spell checker" won't catch them. It is one of those I before E exceptions along with the good old English horrors like slay and sleigh -- yet some of the more sophisticated context word checkers will ask about them -- but not always.

It embarrassed me to have an editor point to one of my words and say -- "You really mean . . ."

And Yes. She was right. I wish I remembered which word it was.

One of the really bright young girls one year behind me in high school had it all figured out for most of the confusing American English words, and taught me the separate seperate connection, which most most people do not mis-spell anyway. But I still have to go back and think, okay, a’s in the middle, e’s on the end -- which was Roberta’s means of remembering the spelling. Now-a-days I think par!

Moments ago on Xomba, I read a post where the story stated the horses and mules ["had broken their reigns"] and that is when I marveled at English, once again. Of course, the author or his editor will eventually catch it. I could not get involved in the story. But some writers have a hard time catching me, or hooking my attention when they make that kind of error. Many people liked the late James A Michener -- whose writing I could not get into though when screen-played into a movie -- I usually enjoyed. Perhaps I will revisit his style. Sometime.

Rain, no sweat. It rains cats and dogs, but more often frogs.

Rein, a guide, a horses’ reins, a means of controlling something, people or animals. You may want to rein in your dog, your daughter, your son; your emotions.

Reign of terror, reign of the Virgin Queen. The American Embarrassment: The reign of George W Bush. What is worse is the fact that stupidity was “allowed” to reign.

I remember another editor equipped with a word processor and a spell checker and with it had taken “lightning” to “lightening” . . . and it took telling her that lightening was a good word like lightening the load, whereas lightning was also a good word -- and that is what a surviving colleague was struck by and what the article was about..

English. What a glorious mess. I will never forgive the change from normalacy to normalcy, largely fostered by Edwin Newman in his Strictly Speaking subtitled "Will America be the death of English ?" Published in 1974. He pointed out according to Wikipedia “banalities, cliches, pomposities, redundancies and catchphrases.” But he was actually a little early to experience and write before 1974 the pillorying given words like gay, or other words for the sake of political correctness. And in answering his question about American’s killing the Language? No, the English can do it too and have been moving right along in a slangy way.

I also suggest English stay alive and dynamic -- not fixed like Latin.

How is your reign going? Do you hope you can rein in your frivolous expenditures? Will rain dispel the drought in areas of the west this summer? Or will the rain mean terrible flooding?

Reign, rein, rain. I could use some rain.
But not too much.