Disfigurement of Speech

One of my more annoying tendencies (among a great many, I suppose) is that I am rapidly fatigued to the point of screaming by mangled English, especially when people repeat mangled English in an attempt to be fashionable.

About ten years ago the word "coffer" was big on the local news. "County coffers are nearly empty..." the reporter says. Coffers were said to be overstuffed, empty, depleted, draining, filling, holding their own, and even in some cases absconded with. And every time some TV reporter said "coffer" I had a mental image of a pirate standing with one booted foot on a coffer full of looted Spanish doubloons and holding a matchlock pistol in each hand.

Another one that drives me bonkers is the word "hottie" when used to describe a MOTAS (Member of the Appropriate Sex) who possesses a high degree of physical beauty. My distaste for the word isn't based on any consideration of the feelings of the hottie thus described, though. Mainly the word reminds me of a time in my life when a certain guy (one hesitates to employ the term loser)used to come over to my house about once a week, get massively hammered on the cheapest booze he could find, whine about "them hotties" for a while, and then pass out with his head in the litter box. Not a part of my life I'm keen to remember very clearly.

But my current least favorite figure of speech is hone in, as in "Let’s hone in on that issue for a moment…” One does not hone in on anything. One can home in, and that’s really what they mean, but everyone says hone in and so everyone keeps saying it (I even saw it in a book written by an honest-to-gosh Ph.D!). To hone is to polish, strop or otherwise put a final finish on a metal object, usually the working edge of a tool or a cylinder bore in an engine. So you could hone an issue, but you can’t hone in on an issue. So I think for now I'll home in on the fact that honing in doesn't exist and can't happen.

And people say I am difficult and unapproachable!