Eddie On Everything

It’s “Toe the Line,” not “Tow the Line”

June 2, 2006 on 1:48 am | In grammar |

“It’s a hard line to tow.”

That’s how the email ended, making me grin ear-to-ear as I pictured the sender pulling a large load with a rope tied around her waist.

The phrase is “toe the line,” not “tow the line.”

It’s an easy mistake to make, as WorldWideWords.org points out:

It’s correctly toe the line, but it is indeed often seen as tow the line, an error that’s all too easy to make when in a hurry. In this case, the association of ideas between tow and line (in the sense of a rope) is often too powerful to overcome, and the lack of any clear mental image of where it comes from is a contributing factor.

Grammartips.com provides some background:

The phrase “toe the line” is equivalent to “toe the mark,” both of which mean to conform to a rule or a standard. The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002; ed. by Glynnis Chantrell) says, “The idiom toe the line from an athletics analogy originated in the early 19th century” (514).

I’d always assumed that the phrase had something to do with keeping one’s toes on or near a line. Which is very different mental image than the one “tow the line” conjures up. ;-)