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Home in / Hone in

For an extra $500, I join Facebook and defriend them.

Dear Word Detective: Which is correct: to “home in on” something or “to hone in on” something?  Are they interchangeable?  I don’t think so, but which is correct? — Bill Wagner.

Oh, correct, shmorrect.  Whatever floats your boat, I say.  It’s a lovely day and I have cats to herd.  If you’re really worried about being “correct,” you can always pony up for my Post Facto Usage Insurance (PFUI).  PFUI won’t stop you from making what others might consider grammar or usage “mistakes,” but for five bucks a month, I promise to track down anyone who criticizes how you use words and tie their shoelaces together.  Wedgies are ten bucks extra.

It’s a hoary cliche (a hoary cliche in itself, of course) that language changes, but most often the change happens so slowly that the new form or usage is dominant before most of us notice.  Often it’s only decades or even centuries later that the language cops raise a hue and cry over a “degradation of the language,” frequently blissfully unaware that said “degradation” was pioneered by an illiterate boob named William Shakespeare.  In the case of “home in on” and “hone in on,” the change is happening right now, and, thanks to the ubiquitous printed media, we can watch both forms duking it out in real time.

The “more proper,” traditional, and original form of the idiom is “to home in on,” meaning to adjust one’s trajectory, whether literal or metaphorical, so as to set an accurate course for a target or goal (“A good officer could even ‘home in on a bottle of whisky’ placed on the landing field,” 1956).  The verb “to home” in this sense comes from the behavior of homing pigeons, and was first used by aviators in the 1920s, who “homed on” the crude radio navigation beacons of the day.  “Home in on” was popularized during World War II, and after the war it came into wide use in the figurative sense of “identify an important issue, problem or solution, etc.”  (“Mexico’s Professor S. F. Beltran homed in on education as a critical need,” New Scientist, 1971).

The use of “to hone in on” in the same sense is considerably more recent, apparently dating to the 1960s and seen mostly in the US.  “Hone” itself is a perfectly good verb, of course, meaning “to sharpen,” and comes from the noun “hone,” which comes from the Old English “han” (rock) and today means “sharpening stone, whetstone.”  Chefs have been “honing” their knives for centuries.

The substitution of “hone” for “home” is not a mere spelling mistake; there’s actually a bit of logic to it.  “Hone” has been used in a figurative sense since the mid-19th century to mean “practice or refine,” and we often speak of “honing one’s skills.”  So, for instance, narrowing one’s focus to the most important task on a given day might be plausibly seen as “honing” one’s productivity.  From there it’s a short jump to “honing in” on your top priority.

Which form is correct?  To play it safe, I’d go with “home in on” for the time being.  But in a world where increasing numbers of people have never heard of homing pigeons but every athlete “hones” his or her skills, I’d say that the future probably belongs to “hone in on.”

Mahaska / Mahoska

Dances with gats?

Dear Word Detective:  I am wondering about the origins of the word “mahaska” as used in the 1987 film “The Untouchables.”  The dialog, according to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), is:  “Malone: OK, pal, why the mahaska?  Why are you carrying the gun?”  Googling turns up zilch on the origins of the word “mahaska” aside from a bit of circular and context-specific observation on about.com that it means “concealed firearm.”  What’s the real dope? — Grazi, Troy.

I must admit right off the bat that I never saw the “Untouchables” movie, in part because I couldn’t picture Kevin Costner (Mister Warm Vanilla Milkshake) playing Eliot Ness, a role that, for me, will always belong to the dark and edgy Robert Stack in the early 1960s TV series of the same name.  I remember being thrilled as a child when my uncle told me that we were related to Eliot Ness, only later realizing that he meant I was something like a third cousin to Mr. Stack.  Better than being tied to the torpid Costner clan, I suppose.

Meanwhile, back at your actual question, I had a similarly unsatisfying time prospecting for information about “mahaska” on the internet.  By the way, I don’t often go out of my way to warn folks against websites, but, in my personal opinion, about.com is “about” the biggest waste of time out there.  Anyway, there was a Chief Mahaska of the Iowa tribe in the 19th century, and thus “Mahaska” turns up in county names and the like all over the Midwest.  But while Chief Mahaska was by all accounts a formidable dude, he has nothing to do with “mahaska” in the sense of “concealed weapon.”

I can say that with such certainty because it turns out that “mahaska” is not really the word we’re looking for.  It’s “mahoska” (also “mahosker,” “mahosky,” or just “hoska”) and it’s genuine underworld slang, dating back to at least the 1940s.  Interestingly, the IMDB rendition of the Untouchables  script contains a typo.  David Mamet, the film’s screenwriter, actually spelled it “mahoska.”

First found in print (so far) in 1943 (but probably in use long before that), “mahoska” can mean a wide variety of illicit things:  guns, drugs, or anything that must be kept secret.  It seems to have been especially popular in New York City, used to mean “heroin,” in the late 20th century.  But Jimmy Breslin, journalist, novelist, and indefatigable chronicler of the New York underworld, once noted that “mahosker” can mean “anything that confers power,” including money or a police badge.

It’s always difficult to pin down the exact roots of underworld slang, since by its nature it’s almost as clandestine as the things it describes, it’s passed down orally and it often changes its spelling and usage along the way.  In the case of “mahoska,” however, we have a plausible theory that not only matches the sense of the word, but covers the wide range of meanings “mahoska” can have.  The Irish phrase “mo thosca” means “my business,” a euphemistic term that conveys the proper secrecy (with a hint of menace) of the usage of “mahoska,” and it seems to be the leading candidate among etymologists as the source of “mahoska.”  So “mo thosca” could have been used to mean almost anything that was “private,” i.e., clandestine, from drugs to social associations, and gradually became “mahoska” among non-Irish speakers.  This theory rings true to me, at least in part because it parallels the use of “la cosa nostra” (“this thing of ours”) by the Mafia to refer to their organization.

Gin up

How to make your horse hate you.

Dear Word Detective:  I’m supposed to be balancing my checkbook, but instead I was reading through frivolous news and blogs this evening.  Again, today, President Obama used the expression “ginned up” to describe the perhaps made-up hysteria of politicians, media, and the like about the latest topics of discussion proposed by his administration.  He has used this a few times over the past few months and each time, I have thought (and then forgot) to look it up.  I finally did — and confirmed my interpretation of what he means by it.  However, there are a few different theories as to the origin of this expression: 1) derived from “ginger up,” relating to spicing something up (including a horse’s tail!); or 2) derived from “engined up” as if powered up by something.  What is your take on this (re)addition to the political lexicon? — Jenny Nunemacher.

I know what you mean — I too routinely make a mental note to look something up online when I get get home and get the chance, but then promptly forget to do so, often forever.  I suppose I could get one of those cell phones that also has a web browser, but I hate telephones.  Yesterday I discovered that our ancient cell phone (which we keep in the car) somehow became set, at least three years ago, to not accept incoming calls.  Awesome.  I’m leaving it that way.

I had noticed President Obama’s use of “gin up” to mean “agitate or excite,” usually by means of a phony or exaggerated controversy, during the campaign last year, and he seems to have singlehandedly revived this fine old Americanism.  “Gin up” has never fallen entirely out of use since it first appeared in the 19th century.  But the phrase has definitely stepped back into the limelight of late, including in an odd sentence in the Wall Street Journal recently that embedded it in an especially garbled example of what grammarians call over-negation: “Can you really hope to gin up a red scare without almost no reds?”  Um, no?

In its original sense, “to gin up” meant simply “to excite, to make lively,” although today there is almost always an implication that the premise of the excitement is fabricated or “cooked up.”  There are, as you found, two main theories as to the origins of “gin up.”  Neither of them has any connection, by the way, to “gin” the liquor, which comes from the Dutch word for “juniper,” used to flavor the drink.

The first traces “gin up” to the noun “gin,” a short form of “engine,” which originally simply meant “intelligence or inventiveness” (from the Latin “ingenium,” which also gave us “ingenuity”).  “Engine” in the derivative sense of “machine,” a product of such inventiveness, dates back to the 14th century.  The shortened form “gin” has meant “skill or ingenuity” since the 13th century when “to gin” was also used to mean “to start up or begin.”  It is possible that “gin up” in the sense of “create excitement” comes from this “start” sense.  It is also possible that “gin up” was inspired by the “cotton gin” (short for “cotton engine”), a machine used to remove the seeds from cotton in the American South in the 19th century.  As of 1887, “to gin” meant “to work hard” or “make things hum” like a cotton gin in operation.

The other theory of “gin up” traces it to the application of ginger (the spice) to the posteriors of horses in order to make them appear livelier to a prospective purchaser or to run faster in a race.  Such “gingering” was apparently widespread at one time.  That sounds to me like a prescription for getting yourself kicked, but the Oxford English Dictionary likes this theory.  Personally, I lean more toward the “gin” in the “create or start up” sense as the root of “gin up.”