Last week a friend of mine text messaged me during the day to ask if I’d be joining her that night at Karaoke at Four Farthings, a cozy irish pub in Lincoln Park. They’ve got karaoke every Thursday night, and a group of my friends can usually be found there a couple of times a month. We know the bartenders, the waitresses, and the guy who runs the karaoke machine was even a guest in my home this past Thanksgiving. But all of that is mostly beside the point. Ok, it’s entirely beside the point. So, after getting this text from my friend Lisa, I responded that I was most likely going to be there that night. Her response was this: “Sounds Gr8. Let’s touch base later”.
Now, I’m aware that we live in a world in which we constantly say things we dont really mean: “Hi, how are you?”, “Take care”, and my personal favorite – “talk to you later (TTYL!)”. We dont really care how the other person is doing, “take care” means I hope I never see or talk to you again, and TTYL simply means “leave me alone”. But “touching base”? I know what that really means is “let’s be in touch”, but how did such a simple phrase turn into touching base? What base? Whose base? Mine, yours? Is there a neutral base? To find out more about this, I went to the source of all of life’s information: Wikipedia. This search left me even more confused. Here’s what Wikipedia told me:
everyone has the same information. In baseball, a player who is touching a base
is not in danger of being put out. May also be a military term. Another
explanation is that a player briefly touches each of the bases when he runs
around after hitting a home run; therefore “touching base” is briefly checking
in (this is more similar to the meaning in the above example). It may also refer
to a seldom enforced rule, 7.08(d) which implies that a runner must touch base
after a batter hits a foul ball which goes out of play.
Huh? how is this even close to an explanation?
