N or M

Last Saturday's The Times mentioned...

<tangent>
(or perhaps homed in on [Self-referential, moi? ])
</tangent>

a point that I wrote about here) – the variation between 'home in on' and 'hone in on'. Rose Wild observed in the Feedback column  that the N-version was more common in American English than in British English, agreeing with the observation I made in that post, starting with a visit to the British National Corpus:

<pre-script>

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

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

<HD24>
As usual with stuff I've written, I couldn't make sense of this at first . What I meant was that there was a tide in the usage, and my feelings about it didn't signify.
</HD24>

</parenthesis>

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

 

...[HD 2024: whereas in American English]

'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.

</pre-script>

She wrote...

<parenthesis>
(in fact she attributed it to a correspondent, but she was sparing with quotation marks, so it's hard to tell who supplied the bit about  'making sense', which rather stuck in my craw.)
</parenthesis>

... that the substitution of 'hone in on' for home in on' was "an eggcorn – a phrase based on a mishearing that sounds like the original and catches on because it makes sense (sic: my emphasis)" . A hearer can make sense of it; I'm not convinced that is the same as making sense. Or perhaps it is. Discuss.

Interestingly (for me at least thinking, about unjustified Ns cropping up in popular usage) the previous week's Feedback column had referred to the tendency  in American English for 'careened' to occur when right-thinking people would have expected 'careered'.

<autobiographical-note>
(I first noticed this while listening to the Mud Slime Slim album, and assumed that James Taylor was the prime culprit.)
</autobiographical-note>

  But N seems to be a repeat offender here.

<brickbat-dodging>
And 'offender' is the wrong word of course.'He only does it to annoy/Because he knows it teases'
</brickbat-dodging>

In another case,...

<covering-his-back>
(not the same case – this is not a matter of N replacing another letter in the course of ongoing language use, but rather a matter of N spontaneously occurring in the course of language development – but still, it is a case of an N appearing where it's not expected)
</covering-his-back>

...'message'  has spawned 'messeNger', 'passage'=>'passeNger'... There must be others...

But I have promises to keep, etc.

b