the.com/home base
The one place you can be fully yourself, fully tired, fully unimpressive.
means The starting point or safe spot you return to between ventures out into the world — literal in games and sports, figurative everywhere else.
from Straight out of American sandlot baseball and street games like tag, where 'home base' (or 'home plate') was the fixed spot you had to touch to be safe. The literal base stayed in sports; the figurative sense — the secure place you operate from or retreat to — spread into general English through the 20th century as a natural metaphor for safety and belonging.
- origin
- Baseball term, borrowed by tag and hide-and-seek
- psychology
- Secure base theory says it fuels braver exploration
- irony
- Often the place you take most for granted
- not geography
- Can be a person, not just a place