‘Where seldom is heardsworth a discouraging Wordsworth, / And the skies are not cloudy all day,’ sang my husband in the manner, he thought, of Cary Grant in Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, with variations. His excuse was my mentioning the word home.
‘Where seldom is heardsworth a discouraging Wordsworth, / And the skies are not cloudy all day,’ sang my husband in the manner, he thought, of Cary Grant in Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, with variations. His excuse was my mentioning the word home.
I had only asked why everyone was suddenly using the phrase hone in on instead of home in on. It was the second time in a week that I had heard a seemingly important person use the phrase on the television. I can understand pronunciation being uncertain with a new word such as vuvuzela. For some time I thought it was pronounced like Methuselah. But how can a man of mature years and sufficient stature to be giving an opinion on a current affairs programme suddenly begins to say hone in when for 40 years he had been saying home in? Or are we to suppose that he never had said home in, but now picked up this new metaphor? Or was there an element of erroneous self-correction in his adopting the new version?
It is not yet a lost cause, if I read aright the history of one appearance in the Guardian online edition. At 7 a.m. on 12 April 2010 an article on the Digital Economy Act appeared on the Guardian website with the introductory apparatus: ‘Fears increase that law firms may hone in on innocent web users’. At 8.54 a.m. a reader responded under the pseudonym LePendu, ‘Home in, for pity’s sake. NOT hone. What’s wrong with the Guardian lately — have you lost the ability to use English correctly?’ In the online ‘community’ this is quite restrained language. By 11.27 a.m. the standfirst appeared with hone replaced by home.
The misuse of hone demonstrates that, for some, home or hone are dead metaphors. Most words are. When we say circumstances, we do not picture anything standing around. Even so, there are those who object to under the circumstances, which they say should be in the circumstances. That surely misses the point. Unless you are Pooh, you may live under a name without having it nailed up over you. For all that, to me, hone has not lost its meaning of ‘sharpen’, and I cannot foresee a time when I might say hone in on. Can you?
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