Is chess a sport? Ending the debate

Someone who likes crappy television should watch Survivor to see if they can draw the line between made-up sports and made-up games (not sports) among their "challenges".

Russell Means?

Interesting that you say hone and we say home and it amounts to exactly the same thing.

Some chess enthusiasts do collect stamps with chess pieces, just as train or aeroplane aficionados do similar with, er, trains and planes. It is more exciting than chess, due to the chance of lighting on something worth a lot. Same with coin collecting and maybe more so.

I was a great fan of Jay Silverheels as a kid. And Clayton Moore of course.

You say home when you are sharpening a knife?

Most people who use it on others don't know what it means, to the extent that they're referring to themselves. They tend to use the reverse logic, where they imagine that people who discuss difficult subjects do so because they believe that it stakes a claim in the intellectual arena, which is automatically invalidated and the opposite established, by Messrs Kruger and Dunning, of great fame and notoriety within the World of psychology, although apparently my wife managed to get a psychology BSc without ever having heard of them, which may put them into perspective a bit.

Hone in - sharpen one's perspective on something
Home in - advance in an understanding of something
My guess is that the original phrase would be the second one ... the Brit one, and to emigrated Americans it reminded them too much of Britain, so they altered it.

So same meaning the way I used it, but originating from different metaphors. I use both in my speech, but use hone more often. It came up in someone else's writing a few weeks ago so I did some checking; surprisingly to me, home in is more common today in American English.

I would guess that hone is older because humans have been sharpening blades for millennia. 

Also "I couldn't care less" (correctly literal meaning .... GB)
"I could care less" (logically incorrect but ironic meaning .... USA)

I would guess that hone is older because humans have been sharpening blades for millennia>>

To home is also a verb, as in homing pigeon. It has a more universal meaning and, also, we don't hone knives; we sharpen them. Must do an etymological search on sharpen and hone.

hone
/həʊn/
 
Origin
Middle English: from Old English hān ‘stone’, of Germanic origin; related to Old Norse hein .

I checked my dictionary of American Etymology. As an adjective, it gives 1826 for hone and mid-1500s for home. The 13th century hone was a boundary marker in England. Your guess was correct. We also sharpen knives, but we use honing oil on the stone.

Old English scearp "having a cutting edge; pointed; intellectually acute, active, shrewd; keen (of senses); severe; biting, bitter (of tastes)," from Proto-Germanic *skarpaz, literally "cutting" (source also of Old Saxon scarp, Old Norse skarpr, Old Frisian skerp, Dutch scherp, German scharf "sharp"), from PIE root *sker- (1) "to cut" (source also of Lettish skarbs "sharp," Middle Irish cerb "cutting").

Looking at that and seeing the relative simplicity of the word "han" together with the likelihood that they would "stone" a blade, I believe that both are old but that you are right.
Hone will be older than sharpen.

But as you mention, my guess regarding home in or hone in is likely to be right.

The Barnhardt Concise Dictionary of Etymology, focused on American English gives Sutton atte hone in reference to a stone used as a boundary marker in 1240. The term used in the sense of a sharpening stone it connects to Proto-Germanic Haino, meaning sharpen, but coming into English as hone in 1826.

I disagree with that, because there's no doubt in my mind at least that since blades have been sharpened for many thousands of years and metal blades for over three thousand years, then they would have been sharpened on a stone and the phrase would have been "to stone it", so Barnhardt is most likely to be very far off the mark on that one. He can only go from written evidence, however; and he has presumably neglected the Anglo-Saxon.

The answer is subjective, depending on if we define "sport" as strictly physical competitive endeavors, or just anything that is of value and competitive, such as chess.

Personally I don't see why all sports need to be physical, since I think intuitively "physical sport" sounds like a subset of the idea of "sport." Ultimately of course as long as chess is still played and respected (recognized as being useful and not a waste of time) it's all good. 

If we must rely solely on popular vote, then it seems sports must be predominantly physical...

If fu... king E-sports are a sport than chess is too

No because you're arguing that chess is a sport.