the.com/target
The thing you aim at, hoping your aim was the problem all along.
means A goal, mark, or object that something (an arrow, a bullet, a plan, a criticism) is aimed at.
from From French 'targette,' a small shield, itself a diminutive of 'targe' — a light shield carried by foot soldiers, related to Old English 'targe/targa' and ultimately to a Germanic word for a border or rim (think of a shield's edge). The leap from 'shield' to 'thing you shoot at' happened because archers literally used small round shields as practice marks — so the word for 'what protects you' became the word for 'what gets hit.'
- original meaning
- targe meant shield, not bullseye
- corporate twist
- sales targets borrowed archery logic for quotas
- retail brand
- Target Corp chose the name for memorability, 1962
- idiom shift
- moving target now means shifting, unreliable goal