On 18 Oct 2006 at 7:15, Bruce K H Kau wrote: > I'm off to work, so I don't have time to really search this one. I > recall something in a Safire book on this, but my memory gets worse > with age. "Touch all the bases" used to mean something like "dot your > i's and cross your t's", and that's how I originally heard the > expression. Over the years, it became "touch base", which I can't > really make sense of, even in the idea you note below. My really quick > google seems to suggest that the baseball origin is probably correct, > but not definitive.
To me, those are two separate idioms, with independent meaning. "Touch base" does *not* mean "dot all the i's and cross the t's" but "get in touch." Both may very well derive from baseball, but they seem to me to be completely independent, rather than one being a devolved version of the other. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
