Gramer Girl here. I'm Minion Fogarty and this week I have a quick and dirty tip about

towing the line. Another quick and dirty tip about the difference between pled and pleated

and a meaty middle about international animal idioms. That's a hard thing to say. Let's

start with the quick and dirty tips.

Basically it seems as if politicians are constantly calculating whether they should tow the party

line or not. But is that tow the line T-O-E or tow the line T-O-W? You can imagine logical

reasons for it to be either one, but the right choice is tow the line like the toes on your

footseys. 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 towing the line

you could tow the mark or tow the trig a line marked on the ground. And later you could

tow the scratch again a kind of mark. The general idea is of people lining up in a row in the

same place, at least sometimes to start a race or a contest. You can imagine how people lining

up in a row with their toes on a line would lead to the idea of people falling in line,

as in conforming to a political agenda or behaving the way superiors want them to behave.

So your quick and dirty tip is that when you're writing about people towing the line, think

of them standing with their Toe toes on a real line on the ground and then you'll get the

spelling right. And now, since that was short, I have another quick and dirty tip for you.

What is the past tense of the verb to plead? Should we say that squiggly plaid guilty or

squiggly pleaded guilty? Think about it for a second. Most sources say that the correct past

tense is pleaded. Squiggly pleaded guilty, that dirty rotten scoundrel. Garner's modern American

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