Had I bothered to
check the calendar, I might not have been so rash. It was, after all, the Ides
of March. On that pleasant afternoon, there wasn’t much shaking at the
old-folks’ home and I found myself surfing the web, eventually landing on the
Star Beacon website. Taking a leisurely scroll through the national news on my
way to the sports news, I came upon the headline “Scientists home in on the
real ‘fat gene’”
“Hone!” I seethed. “You idiot, the word is
hone. You ‘hone in’ on something. You don’t ‘home in.’”
Back when I was a productive member of the
human race I would have been satisfied with simply finding the error. Now, I
have nothing but time on my hands. Time to trudge through the websites of
countless language mavens in order to amass a mountain of evidence that “home
in” isn’t merely wrong, it is most sincerely wrong.
(Author’s note: I was not leveling my
accusations at the good folks in the Star Beacon newsroom. The story in
question is from the Los Angeles Times. I was certain the error was imported
from the West Coast.)
Perched at my laptop, I honed in on “honed
in.” The search was but a nanosecond or two old when it became clear that I
should have been homing in. At merriam-webster.com I came upon this: “. . . use
of it [hone in] especially in writing is likely to be called a mistake. Home in
or in figurative use zero in does nicely.”
Ouch.
The situation worsened at grammar.about.com,
where Richard Nordquist writes, “home in, not hone in, is the correct phrase.”
According to Nordquist, the phrase was first used in the 19th century to refer
to what homing pigeons do. Later, it also came to refer to what aircraft and
missiles do.
In an excerpt from Merriam-Webster
Dictionary of American Usage, 1994, Mary McCrory and William Safire get kudos
for their 1980 chastisements of George H.W. Bush, who, during the presidential
campaign, talked about “honing in on the issues.” “Safire observed that hone in
on is a confused variant of home in on and there seems to be little doubt that
he was right,” at least according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English
Usage, 1994.
I stand corrected. No I don’t; I can’t stand
to be wrong. I’ll sit corrected.
In breaking news on the linguistic front,
German is sounding more and more like American English these days. According to
a story by Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson on the NPR website, the Germans have borrowed
more than 10,000 American words since 1990. One of the more widely used
borrowed words is “sorry,” which the Germans pronounce “sogh-ee.”
Why is it so popular? Well, Anatol
Stefanowitsch, an English linguistics professor at the Free University of
Berlin, told Nelson: “I mean, ‘sorry’ is quite a useful way of apologizing
because it doesn't commit you to very much. It's very easy to say ‘sorry.’”
Early on in this piece I suggested the
editor who used “home in” in the headline was an idiot. Before I close, I want
to say to him or her, “I’m sorry.”
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