Mine is tow the line rather than toe the line.
I imagine someone as a tugboat–towing the line of what is expected. I like that imagery better than keeping a foot on some fucking line. Plus using toe as a verb is dumb.
What are yours?
Mine is tow the line rather than toe the line.
I imagine someone as a tugboat–towing the line of what is expected. I like that imagery better than keeping a foot on some fucking line. Plus using toe as a verb is dumb.
What are yours?
TBF, avoiding going over a certain line is hugely important across dozens of significant disciplines and areas. It’s literally critically and vitally important in many cases. As for “toe,” it’s probably an old-school usage of a verb which is preserved in that phrase, but not carried on otherwise. Making it sound weird, today.
“It’s like apples and oranges!”
I think I probably misunderstood that one from the start. Far as I know the real meaning is simply “similar, yet different.”
But in my head I was asking myself: "so they’re both fruit, both roundish, both commonly the same size, both sweet-tasting, both common lunch items, both hugely cultivated, both widely sold, both inexpensive, both pretty healthy & nutritious… etc, etc… so then, you’re trying to tell me that they’re vastly more similar than dissimilar?! What??
People hear take the phrase “you can’t compare apples and oranges” and get confused as to why you wouldn’t be allowed to compare two fruits. But I think the intended meaning of that phrase is more like “you cannot compare apples to oranges as if they are the same thing/category”. So imagine you’re comparing apples with other apples and someone wants to bring up how oranges fare in the considerations. You may be inclined to respond “Sorry, those are too different to apply here” which is what the original phrase intended to convey. Which of course nowadays is sometimes shortened to someone quipping “apples and oranges, mate” and leaving it at that.
That would make it a fossil word (one of my favorite language quirks)!