Grammar Girl here. I'm in Jan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about

writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, we're going to talk about towing the line,

and then we're going to talk about some fun kinds of metaphors, metonymy and synecdoche.

But before we start, I have a quick correction to my piece a few weeks ago about the phrase

the state of the union. I said the address the president gives the first year in office is called

the inaugural address. But that's the address the president gives the day of the inauguration. Duh. Well, my confusion

came from a congressional research report that called the first year address the inaugural

state of the union address with inaugural in quotation marks. So in retrospect, I think the

report was just using inaugural to mean first. That is one of its meanings.

The address that's a couple of months later that's more analogous to the state of the union

address seems to typically be called something more general, like just saying the president is

giving an address to Congress or something like that. But it's not the official inaugural address.

That's the one that happens the day of the inauguration.

We're seeing a lot of people under pressure to tow the line these days,

which reminded me of a tip I originally wrote back in 2017.

Is the phrase written tow the line T-O-E or tow the line T-O-W? You can imagine a logical

reason for it to be either one, but it doesn't have anything to do with pulling or dragging something,

even though it might feel like it to the people involved. The right choice is tow the line,

T-O-E, like the toes on your footsies. One of the first examples in the Oxford English Dictionary

is from an 1834 book called Peter Simple, written by the naval officer and novelist Frederick Marriott. The line reads,

He desired us to tow a line, which means to stand in a row. Toe the line is actually part of a

group of phrases that all have people towing something. Earlier than snuggling your toes up to a line,

...