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Photo, courtesy Wikimedia Commons, Andreas Trepte<\/p><\/div>\n
No, not banana bread. My OTHER guilty pleas–<\/p>\n
No, not Ham and ‘Tater BakeOver, neither! My OTHER other guil–okay, I’ll just come out with it:<\/p>\n
The New York Times.<\/em><\/p>\n Delivered to my mailbox every day, a day late.<\/p>\n I may be a country girl (er, farmgirl princess), but I’m sweet on their Travel, Arts, Business, Home, and Science sections, well, just about all of it, but I also subscribe to our local daily newspaper. (It actually costs more than a sub to The New York Times<\/em>.) It all started years ago when I wanted to read The New York Times Book Review<\/em> without fail. (It comes out once per week IN the newspaper itself.) Their Review<\/em> is my way of \u201creading\u201d all the books I can\u2019t possibly, actually, read.<\/p>\n Anyway, just before the last election, I’m sitting there reading a Nate Silver article and see this:<\/p>\n “I’ve started to hone<\/strong> in on the seats…”<\/p>\n Not “home<\/strong> in,” mind you, but “hone<\/strong> in.”<\/p>\n Well, it’s been stuck in my brain ever since! So let’s home<\/strong> in on the issue.<\/p>\n “Home<\/strong> in” came into use in the 1800s to describe homing<\/strong> pigeons doing their thing. (Okay, I know this through experience. When I was a kid, my father erected a 10-foot-high, 2-foot-wide section of culvert in our backyard. On top of that, he plopped a homemade pigeon house he\u2019d built. He wanted us to KNOW the concept of homing pigeons. Whenever we left for a camping trip, we\u2019d catch and load some of our homing pigeons into a cage, put it on the back seat of our old sedan\u2014also loaded down with tents, sleeping bags, and fishing poles\u2014and then let the homing pigeons loose just before we left to come back home. The race was on! But they\u2019d almost always beat us home. (Really, it was my parents’ way of keeping some of us occupied while they were packing for a trip. Have you tried catching a pigeon lately?)<\/p>\n After the 1800s and into the next century, \u201chome<\/strong> in<\/strong>\u201d was being used to describe aircrafts and the like. Of course, by that time, the phrase was also being misused, a la “hone in<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n But hone<\/strong> means to sharpen something. Something physical, like your favorite banana bread knife on a whetstone, or something abstract, like my killer wit (I’m also honing<\/strong> my modesty.)<\/p>\n So if you’re zeroing in on something, you’re homing<\/strong> in, not honing<\/strong> in. But this here English language is a work-in-progress, and some dictionaries now include “hone<\/strong> in” as an acceptable alternative.<\/p>\n I’m a stickler who’s “stickling” with “home<\/strong> in,” especially given my whispering ways with pigeons. (Does this mean I\u2019ll end up on a park bench when I\u2019m old?)<\/p>\n But what do you think? Should “hone<\/strong> in” catch a break?\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once upon a time, long, long ago…(Fall of 2010) In a faraway land…(Moscow, Idaho) a farmgirl princess (MaryJane Butters) was indulging in one of her favorite, guilty pleasures… Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/gleaming_word\/20110412-NYT-IMG_4217.jpg\" "\\"20110412-NYT-IMG_4217\\"")
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