Our tweeting readers have homed in on what they characterize as a flagrant misuse in this week’s Comment. Steve Coll writes, about the evolution of the two big Party Conventions, that although the procedure by which the Republicans and the Democrats nominate their candidates for President changed, over the years, in ways that rendered the Conventions irrelevant, “the tradition of free political airtime had been established, and admen honed in and fashioned the quadrennial infomercials we now endure.” A million tweeters think it should be “homed in.”
The readers whose sensibilities were most outraged attributed this errant use of “honed in” to George Bush (the First), who spoke of “honing in on the issues” during the Presidential campaign of 1980. They suggested that if The New Yorker was citing Bush as a usage authority then these must indeed be the end times.
To “home in on” means, of course, to “proceed or direct attention toward an objective (science is homing in on the mysterious human process—Sam Glucksberg).” The citation is from Webster’s 9th, first published in 1983, which makes no mention of “hone in.” Webster’s 11th, published in 2003, gives “hone in” its own entry, as an alteration of “home in,” dating from 1965: “to move toward or focus attention on an objective”—and cites not George Bush but George Plimpton (“looking back for the ball honing in”). Plimpton may or may not have erred, but, in any case, he was a literary lion and his use of “hone in” is enshrined in Webster’s.
There are a couple of ways of looking at this. One is prescriptive: “hone in” is an error for “home in.” Another is descriptive: “hone in” is an improvement on “home in,” enjoying the connotations of the verb “to hone” (Web 11)—“to make more acute, intense, or effective (helped her hone her comic timing to perfection—Patricia Bosworth)”; that is to say, to home in sharply. Yet another possibility is that “honed in” was a typographical error for “horned in.” It would fit the context.
For anyone who is determined to find an unambiguous error in this week’s issue, allow me to divert your attention to Tables for Two. A review of a downtown restaurant called Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria refers to the packaged pasta, canned tomatoes, cured sausages, and other comestibles for sale as “artisanal dry goods.” We don’t encounter the “drygoods store” anymore, so it’s possible to forget, if we ever even knew, that “dry goods” meant “textiles, ready-to-wear clothing, and notions as distinguished esp. from hardware and groceries” (Web 11 again). One pictures a little lady in gloves and a bonnet clutching her reticule as she descends from a surrey to purchase buttons and thread. Although the groceries for sale at il Buco Alimentari e Vineria include dry (as opposed to fresh) pasta, they do not fit the definition of dry goods. Nor is the chef a haberdasher.
While worrying about homing in on dry goods yesterday, I honed my parking skills. It was a miserable morning. For one thing, I had a twitch in my right lower eyelid. Waiting for the streetsweeper to come by, my fellow-alternate-side parkers and I groaned as a moving van took up two precious parking spots. When the streetsweeper came, a car behind me got on its tail, I horned in behind him, and as we homed in on the curb a car that had been double-parked squeezed in on my left and yet another car shot out of a driveway on my right, achieving a pincer effect. I honked and braked and twitched and fell back in the line of cars, but in the end there was room for all of us, as well as for another driver who came along behind me and asked three times if I could give him two inches. I was not very nice about it. Don’t wedge me in. Having written this in the spirit of atonement, I hope to have cleared the air before the long weekend and the New Year.
Illustration by Laurie Rosenwald.
