It’s Snowing, and I’m Feeling Peevish

Listen up, people.  It’s not hone in on, it’s home in on.  Like a homing pigeon, or a heat-seeking missile, or one of the assortment of other things that pick out a home base, or a particular target, and are drawn or guided to it.

Also:  The past tense of the verb to lead is led.  If it’s spelled lead and pronounced the same as led, then it’s a noun not a verb and it’s a metal.  On the other hand, the past tense of the verb to read, which rhymes with to lead, is read, which rhymes with led.  English spelling is not logical.  There are a lot of reasons for this; one of them is that the language started taking on its modern written form while the spoken language was still going through some heavy changes, particularly where the vowels were concerned.

And it isn’t orientated — it’s oriented.  (If you’re disoriented, you don’t know which way is east.  If the history of European cartography had gone differently, you might have been disoccidented instead, but fate decreed otherwise and a perfectly good adjective never even existed.)

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