Meaningful versus Nonsensical

My latest podcast discoveries include these two:

• The Infinite Monkey's Guide To...
• Add To Playlist – also broadcast on Saturday evenings

The first of these is a compendium of the best bits of long-lived (since November 2009) series The Infinite Monkey Cage, grouped on thematic lines...

<autobiographical-note>

It is, in principle, similar to a (stalled) project that I was worklng on until various software tools I was using were changed and/or canned. Words and Music is a compendium of my favorite bits of this blog. In an ideal world it will be completed, but breath retention is not recommended.
<autobiographical-note>

...And in an early one of these Robin Ince asks 'Why do we say "human being"? We don't say "daffodil being"...

<tangent>
That quote is approximate. I wanted to trace it and transcribe it properly, but BBC Sounds have done their usual trick of APPALING curation.  I've whinged before about the annoying tendency of the BBC to crow about the richness of its back-catalogue while failing miserably to make that catalogue accessible in any intelligent way. The Infinite Monkey's Guide To... exemplifies this in spades. Even the list of "Other Episodes" is opaque: the important bit after the word "To..." is truncated. And when you do find the episode you want, there's no guide to where clips came from. 

<inline-ps>

I wronged them - you can trace the clips if you know where to look. Some hyperlinks would have been useful though,  rather than a series/episode reference; we do have computers nowadays, and you'd think a podcast like this would take advantage of such new-fangled stuff.

</inline-ps>

</tangent>

...The answer was provided by my grandfather: '"Human" is an adjective' he would say (in spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary). 'It needs "being" to make it into a noun phrase.' 

<autobiographical-note>
(I could hear Archie's voice as soon as Robin Ince spoke.)
</autobiographical-note>

Add To Playlist is a relative newcomer, and it is a joy; not an unalloyed joy – read on. The idea of the programme is simple: two regulars and two musician guests make a daisy-chain of tracks, commenting on structure/melody/rhythm/instrumentation ... etc, and making links between one track and the next. Often one of the recorded artists joins them down the line.

Now we come to the 'not unalloyed' bit. I do wish Cerys Matthews (who is an amazing source of interesting musical insight) wasn't so fond of the expression 'hoNe in on'. When I first heard it, I thought 'Surely not?' And I checked in the British National Corpus:

'That's right' I thought; 'Only one instance. A solitary ignoramus got it wrong.'

<parenthesis>
Oh dear. Me and Cnut...
</parenthesis>

On the other hand there were many of the M-version ('hoMe in on') :

But Ms Matthews has led her co-presenter astray, and now he's doing it too.

The BNC, though, is not very large or very up-to-date. The Corpus of Contemporary American English offers a less parochial view. And there the different commonness of the two forms is much more balanced:

'Home in on' is the commoner of the two, but only by a whisker.

Finally, I used my favourite newly discovered language-related software tool to compare the two.

The expression 'home in on' took off about the same time as computers and related technologies used in guided weaponry, and for twenty years it had the field to itself. Then 'hone in on' appeared, but until the mid-'80s it never represented more than a quarter of its soundalike. Then, from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s something strange happened: 'home in on' marked time, and 'hone in on' took advantage. It is as if a significant number of M-users tried the N-version as an experiment, and stuck with it; and this infected...

<parenthesis>
(is my prejudice showing?)
</parenthesis>

... the people who had not yet adopted either expression, with the result that for the next two decades the N-version rose in popularity more steeply than the original. Since then, shares have remained roughly stable, with the MEANINGFUL version outnumbering the NONSENSICAL one, but not by much.

That's all for now. There's work to do in the garden, and notes to bash in preparation for this (which I have sung before, but more than 30 years ago – so that although passages are familiar, I don't know it as well as I think):

b

Update: 2023.10.25.14:30 - Added <inline-ps />