Cutting to standard usage
I feel like I might have posted about this before, but I just read another example and it made me jump. So, here are a few sentences to read:
Her camera hews so closely to his world view that you become fully immersed in his sadness. - The New Yorker
She struck me as someone who had hewed to the line of her own ambition without sacrificing crucial pieces of her feminine identity along the way. - New York Times, 11 Sep 09
And that’s how Ted Kennedy became the greatest legislator of our time. He did it by hewing to principle, but also by seeking compromise and common cause. - Barack Obama's eulogy
What fascinates me about this sense of hew is that in England it is utterly wrong - or at least, to me it seems utterly wrong. And yet, while some ‘disputed’ or ‘non-standard’ usages are more common on one side of the Atlantic than the other, this one seems unusual in being wrong over here but a totally uncommented-on part of standard English in the US. It's not mentioned in any of my usage guides, though it's not even in the OED yet.
What also fascinates me is how it came about - which I am sure must be by a confusion with cleave. Cleave has two contradictory meanings, ‘cut apart’ (OE clēofan) and ‘stick to’ (OE cleofian). But hew only ever meant ‘cut’, so I am assuming at some point writers starting confusing the two, or assuming it was some sort of sense-development rather than two separate words.
Do you find the sentences above perfectly normal? And how does this fly in places like Australia?