dot the i's and cross the t's
Be meticulous and precise, fill in all the particulars, as in Laura had dotted all the i's and crossed the t's, so she wondered what she'd done wrong. This expression presumably began as an admonition to schoolchildren to write carefully and is sometimes shortened. William Makepeace Thackeray had it in a magazine article (Scribner's Magazine, 1849): "I have . . . dotted the i's." [Mid-1800s]
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| a screen or mat covered with a dark material for shielding a camera lens from excess light or glare. |
| a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. |