touch and go

Example: “It was touch and go for a while, but the seedlings survived the frost.”

Origin: The phrase's very first recorded use, in a 1549 sermon by the Protestant preacher Hugh Latimer, meant something quite different from its modern sense — briefly touching on a topic before immediately moving on to the next, a rhetorical technique rather than a description of risk. The now-familiar sense of a precarious, uncertain situation developed later, during the era of sailing ships and horse-drawn stagecoaches. Admiral William Smyth's 1867 Sailor's Word-Book describes a ship that brushes lightly against a rock or the seabed and manages to continue safely on its way as having gone "touch and go" — a genuine near-miss rather than a full disaster. Stagecoach drivers of the same period used a closely related image for skillfully steering close past an obstacle without actually colliding with it. Both maritime and road versions share the same core idea: a moment balanced on a knife's edge between disaster and safe passage, resolved only by the narrowest possible margin.