PS Emphasis on allegedly, but that doesn’t change the joke.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-preposition/

The “never end a sentence with a preposition” and “never split an infinitive” rules of grammar come from 18th-century pedants who thought Latin grammar was perfect and English should work just like it.

In fact, ending sentences with prepositions and splitting infinitives work just fine in English to convey meaning and have done so for centuries, and therefore are “proper” grammar.

One, China has gotten to the point where they are more and more involved in developing a lot of their own patentable ideas, and thus have more interest now in the protection of international patent rights.

Two, Trump has shown the strength of the utilization of tariffs for a wide range of possibilities, and the Chinese are growing more leery of the possibility of the Left using tariffs to achieve “Climate Change” goals. Trump won’t, because he knows the AGW/”Climate Change” issue is a fraud.

On the other topic, a phrase I have always wondered about is “made out of whole cloth” (meaning “totally false”)—I think it may be more meaningfully thought of as “made out of hole cloth” because, for instance, there is no cloth in the neck and arm-holes of a garment. Something made of hole cloth would be created out of nothing. The image amuses me.

A Tennessee girl gets a scholarship to an Ivy League university. At a new student orientation she asks a girl from Massachusetts “Where are you from?” The girl from Massachusetts replies, “Where I am from we never end a sentence with a preposition.” The Tennessee girl responds, “Ok, so where are you from, bitch.”

Many of us in flyover country may lack proper grammar, but we say what we mean and we mean what we say, and we understand one another perfectly.

The phrase “hone in on” is yet another case, such as the substitution of “jive” for “jibe” (and of course there’s also “gibe,” but never mind), where people for at least a couple of different reasons missed the fact that what was said was actually “home in on.” From old radio lingo, as far as I know (but per M-W it’s much older than radio)*, where one would “home in on the [radio] signal” for some reason good, bad or indifferent.

Not a terribly long step from there to such phrases as “Suddenly he homed in on the truth!” but then “home in on [whatever]” became “hone in on [whatever],” and now here we all are.

*Merriam Webster:
hone
transitive verb
1 : to sharpen or smooth with a whetstone
2 : to make more acute, intense, or effective : [as, for example], “helped her hone her comic timing”— Patricia Bosworth

By the way, M-W also has a discussion of what it believes to be the history and use of the two words, in which it makes what is to me a seriously unconvincing argument that “to hone in on” can be interpreted so as to give the same meaning as “to home in on.”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/home-in-or-hone-in

Tommy, the chess usage is still wrong unless you assume that “to hone” can be used as if it were “to recognize” or “to notice.” But would you say, “Fischer recognized in on his opponent’s unfortunate move and took advantage of it” or “Fischer noticed in on his opponent’s unfortunate move and took advantage of it”?

. . .

Aesop, thanks for the link to the Grammarian. A good refresher. :>))

Trump is indeed the factor, which raises the probability that unless the President who succeeds Trump is equally hard-nosed, the Chinese will revert right back to their prior methods. Lacking a moral conscience, their calculus like all the criminally inclined is… what can they get away with?

TommyJay,

A hone is also “A fine-grained whetstone for giving a keen edge to a cutting tool.” Arguably used for sharpening far more than as a bore. Grammar is not my forte but I suspect “hone in on” and “home in on” are equally valid but different in application. A “heat-seeking missile” homes in on an enemy jet’s heat exhaust. Whereas, a chess player seeks to “hone in on” his opponent’s weaknesses. The confusion lies in a greatly deteriorated ‘educational system” and humanity’s all too common tendency toward mental laziness.