An item on the BBC news site didn’t mean what it said: ‘The latest move is part of a wider crackdown by China to reign in the country’s fast-growing tech platforms.’ China may wish long to reign over us, but in this case it wanted to rein in activity.
It wasn’t that the author didn’t know the difference between a horse’s rein and a monarch’s reign. But the moribund metaphor of reining in allowed a homophone to sneak in. If there was a spell-checker on the author’s computer, it would have let it through.
I find that a very common spelling mistake is lead in place of led, as in ‘Boris led the party from victory to victory’. Since the past tense of lead is automatically pronounced led by native English speakers, the spelling lead would not occur to a writer were it not for the existence of the homophone lead, as in lead piping.
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