Copy-editing Arcana and Advertising-related Irony

I’ve come across variations of this twice in the last week:

“Working together, they honed in on the problem.”

It’s “homed in.”

The verb “hone” means to sharpen or make more acute.

The verb “home” means, according to American Heritage:

1. To go or return to one's residence or base of operations.
2. To be guided to a target automatically, as by means of radio waves.
3. To move or lead toward a goal: The investigators were homing in on the truth.

And now for something completely different ... A funny note about my attempt on Friday to trick Google’s ad-assigning computer.

That blog post hasn’t attracted any of the ads I thought it would – male enhancement, etc. But the next-day's post brought a surprise. The post about “relieve/relive stress” attracted a “comment” from a “reader” named Samantha. It said, “I enjoyed reading your post. Read about stress relief at my website …” and a link to a business site.

Somehow I doubt that Samantha enjoyed reading my post. But I suspect that, somewhere in the non-osphere, Google AdSense demons are laughing at me.