Hone What You’re Homing In On

Occasionally the misappropriation of a word or term becomes so common that most people don’t even know it’s used in error. Such may be the case with home in and hone in.

After all, if you’re not listening carefully, the m and n sounds may be hard to distinguish.

Home in originated in the nineteenth century with the use of homing pigeons—a variety of pigeon bred to find its way home after traveling long distance. It’s that homing instinct from which the term home in takes it meaning that finds a target.

Today the term applies more to modern weaponry than bird, but the concept of zeroing in on a target remains the same.

The transitive verb hone has a literal meaning: to sharpen a cutting tool. The figurative meaning of hone is “to perfect a skill.”

Since you wouldn’t say sharpen in, hone in is an alteration of home in, but even the venerable Oxford English Dictionary gives hone in its own entry: “to head directly for something; to turn one’s attention intently towards something.”

• The rookie baseball player is homing in on Babe Ruth’s home run record.
• He was able to do so early in his career because he worked at honing his skill.

A pair of closely related words whose British and American usages are distinctly different are homey and homely. Both languages agree that homey means homelike or characteristic of a home.

Originally, homely meant the same thing, but gradually it has come to mean simple, plain, unadorned. American English degraded its meaning even further so that today it is used to refer to someone or something that is decidedly unattractive.

In Great Britain, homely is still more closely related to its original meaning and refers to someone who keeps a warm and welcoming home.

So be careful  whom you call homely.