Here is a wannabe high-browish piece about Grand Theft Auto, a cleverly violent computer car-based game appealing to most boys of all ages.

The hero of the game is one Niko Bellic, a computerised Balkanite tough egg (Serb?). I suspect that no Serb/Balkan name has a double ll in it following the orthographic reforms of Serbian led by Vuk Karadzic well over a century ago – surely Belic would have been a better try?

Be that as it may, the review looks at the game in terms of its gritty depiction of the immigrant experience as our Balkan newcomer tries to grapple with the contradictions of New World Capitalism:

But he also betrays Mikhael in the name of capitalist production; Mikhael is dangerous, yes, but murder is the stock and trade of such men. The trouble is that his murderousness is no longer profitable; it has, in fact, gotten in the way of the mob’s profitability. His dedication to an outmoded form of production, more than anything else, leads to Mikhael’s destruction.

In the New World, blood loyalties are replaced with contracts, honor with rules, ritual revenge with law. It isn’t that the Old World mode is not just as arbitrary or dangerous; Mikhael is already self-destructing, and Niko, very much an Old World soul, is burdened by considerable misery. The difference is that the new mode is self-aware, and its subscribers can therefore self-modify in order to remain profitable.

If you say so.

What I spotted was this sentence:

The character is viewed from a third person perspective and has free reign over accessible regions.

It is an interesting example of one phrase morphing into another. The original idea is that someone shows or has or is given a ‘free rein’ – letting a horse gallop ahead where it will without hauling on the reins to steer/slow it.

As most people now have little if any dealings with the world of horses, the phrase is mutating into something which sounds and means the same but loses the original imagery while gaining a plausible replacement – hence the new form free reign.

Something similar is happening to expressions like ‘sow confusion’ or ‘sow discontent’. Banal ignorance of both spelling and agricultural metaphor is bringing into the language the strange but maybe not totally inappropriate new metaphor of sew confusion, as I saw now and again in Foreign Office drafts.

Anyone has other examples?