Over at the Gazette, yet another editorial goes wrong.
While trying to praise the work of retiring Rock County Administrator Craig Knutson, the Gazette headlines with Our Views: Rock County’s Craig Knutson deserves salute for solid reign (subscription req’d). (The editorialist uses reign once again, in the body of the editorial.)
The use of reign is most likely a superlative gone bad: in a rush to praise Knutson, that praise includes an imperious description of his tenure, as though he were a king. It’s too much for too little. Even the most ardent supporters would shy from writing, respectively, of a Clinton reign or a Bush reign. (If used at all, that description of tenure would be used only with sarcasm, as an insult.)
It’s not, however, an accidental use in this editorial: it appears twice (title and body), and in any event it’s not as though a thousand monkeys at a thousand keyboards typed away until reign appeared twice. (At least, one supposes that’s not how the Gazette produces its editorials.)
I think it’s something more, really, than just a misused word ignorantly assumed to be one of praise. It’s an obsequiousness to anyone in authority, something ones sees from the Gazette’s editorial board over and over.
Insiders, influencers, self-professed development professionals, corporatist special interest groups, unctuous toads and shady hucksters: those are the people to whom the Gazette speaks, and from whom they wish to curry favor.
It’s too funny that the editorial describes gasps and groans from Rock County board members when they learned of the administrator’s pending retirement, as though mentioning what a few politicians think settles a question more decisively than what many residents think.
As for Rock County, Jefferson County, Walworth County, or any of the other sixty-nine counties of Wisconsin — no one reigns, and it’s an insult (of intention or ignorance) to say otherwise.