the.com/contact
The smallest unit of relationship, filed somewhere between a name and a hope.
means A person you can reach, or the act of reaching them — the link, not yet the relationship.
from From Latin contactus, 'a touching,' built from con- ('together') plus tangere ('to touch') — the same root that gives us 'tangible' and 'tangent.' It entered English in the 1600s as a term for physical touching, and only in the early 1900s did it pick up its sense of 'a person you know who might be useful' — a small, telling shift from skin meeting skin to names meeting rolodex.
- phone book era
- Contacts used to live on paper, alphabetized by hand
- lens meaning
- Contact lens named for touching the eye directly
- space usage
- Mission Control says contact to confirm signal, not friendship
- legal sense
- Physical contact can be the whole basis of a lawsuit