Except when they want to ridicule someone, reporters (or their editors) "clean up" the spoken words quoted in their stories. The stammers and ahems and false starts and missteps of a speaker -- any speaker -- look um, uh, ah, er, ridiculous in print.
Thus it was a particularly snappish bit of bad manners by the Washington Post last week to offer the following selection from a George W. Bush appearance on Hardball:
I look forward to finding out the facts, but someone is sweating bullets right now. They're beginning to hone [sic] in on it.
That sic represents extra exertion by the Post to spotlight a Bush error. "Hone in," though now acceptable to the permissive editors of modern dictionaries owing to its frequent misuse, is a solecism that comes from confusing the verb "to hone," meaning to sharpen, with the similar sounding "home in on," meaning to approach one's target.
Slate's Scott Shuger took note of the Post's glaring sic in his column the next day and wondered, "If a candidate makes the same hones-for-homes mistake as 90 percent of the adult population, should he be sicmatized?" The answer in this case is obvious: no. The Posties were behaving badly in subtly mocking the candidate for a usage error that is rampant in their own ranks.
A quick glance at Nexis shows a veritable honor roll of the paper's own reporters have failed through the years to achieve the same purity of expression they now chide Bush for falling short of. Here's a partial list of Post bylines that have appeared over "honed in on" in recent years: Thomas Boswell, David Broder, Edward Cody, Ceci Connolly, Ann Devroy, John Feinstein, Tony Kornheiser, George Lardner Jr., Myra MacPherson, Courtland Milloy, Liza Mundy, Steven Pearlstein, Tom Shales, Phyllis Richman, and Jonathan Yardley. (And of course it's because worthies like this can't get it right that the dictionary editors have thrown in the towel.)
Post defense reporter Bradley Graham deserves special recognition for bungling the expression in a March 1999 story on "a new missile topped with a 'seeker' for honing in on a target." Which is kind of like homing your blade to a fine edge.
By the way: In the dozens of times the hone/home confusion has been perpetrated in the pages of the Washington Post -- whether in its own writers' words or the words of subjects being quoted -- only once, when it served to make George W. Bush look foolish, was sic inserted. Not to hone the point too fine: The Post owes Bush an apology.