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Thanks, I didn't write the previous comment but had no idea that it was "toe the line" instead of "tow the line." Idioms.....why do they always seem to beat aro

• goodcanadian 8y ago
  Even then, I think it's the wrong idiom. To me, toeing the line means following the rules or maybe supporting the story . . . toeing the company line, for example. I would suggest, rather, that Tesla is walking a fine line between . . .
• vinceguidry 8y ago
  You can usually work out which homophones make up an idiom just by thinking visually about what those homophones would mean in the idiom. "Towing a line" gives you a visual of hauling a cable out to something or someone, perhaps the meaning of that idiom, if it were a thing, would be to save someone. Toeing a line invokes using your foot for, well, something related to a line. Is it an actual line or a metaphorical line? What's the line going to be used for after you toe it? The idiom is usually used in the sense of getting really close to some imaginary, arbitrary boundary. Even if you don't know the history behind the saying, that it's something that boys used to do to mess with each other, you can usually rule one of them out and get pretty close to the actual history / meaning of the idiom. When I first came across it, I 'knew' it was 'toe' and I would have been pretty surprised if it had actually been 'tow'. What I didn't know was the precise thing that the end of the foot was actually supposed to be doing to the supposed line.