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market-farming - Re: market-farming OT Terminology Request

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  • From: robokopp AT acronet.net
  • To: "Dori Green" <dorigreen00 AT hotmail.com>, "Market Farming" <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: market-farming OT Terminology Request
  • Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 08:29:53 cst


Hi,

Another urban legend.

Rick

P.S. Am contemplating constructing one of those unheated hoophouses from the
North Carolina Extension bulletin. What tips are there for securing the
plastic
to the baseboard so it doesn't rip or tear?


RULE OF THUMB

"I'd like to know what the term rule of thumb meant. I remember reading it had
something to do with being permitted to beat your wife with a rod no thicker
than your thumb. Is this correct?"

This sounds like the invention of somebody desperately trying to make sense
of a traditional phrase - what linguists call folk etymology. And it's quite
certainly untrue. But there's a lot more to it than just fevered imagination.

The expression rule of thumb has been recorded since 1692 and probably wasn't
new then. It meant then what it means now - some method or procedure that
comes
from practice or experience, without any formal basis. Some have tried to link
it with brewing; in the days before thermometers, brewers were said to have
gauged the temperature of the fermenting liquor with the thumb (just as
mothers
for generations have tested the temperature of the baby's bath water with
their
elbows). This seems unlikely, as the thumb is not that sensitive and the range
of temperatures for fermentation between too cool and too warm is quite small.


It is much more likely that it comes from the ancient use of bits of the body
to make measurements. There were once many of these: the unit of the foot
comes
from pacing out dimensions; the distance from the tip of the nose to the
outstretched
fingers is about one yard; horse heights are still measured in hands (the
width
of the palm and closed thumb, now fixed at four inches); and so on. There was
an old tailors' axiom that "twice around the thumb is once around the wrist",
which turns up in Gulliver's Travels. It's most likely that the saying comes
from the length of the first joint of the thumb, which is about an inch (I
remember
once seeing a carpenter actually make a rough measurement this way). So the
phrase rule of thumb uses the word rule in the sense of ruler, not regulation,
and directly refers to this method of measurement.

So where does beating your wife come in? Sharon Fenick wrote an article about
its origins in the newsgroup alt.folklore.urban in 1996. She found that for
more than two centuries there have been references in legal works to the idea
that a man may legally beat his wife, provided that he used a stick no thicker
than his thumb; but the references were always to what some people believed,
not to established legal principle. The British common law had long held that
it was legal for a man to chastise his wife in moderation, as one might a
servant
or child, but Sir William Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries on the Laws of
England in 1765 that this principle was by then in decline. So far as I can
discover nothing was ever laid down about how such discipline should be
applied.




>Picky, maybe, but I'm going to ask anyway -- because our language drives our

>thinking, would people please stop using the phrase "rule of thumb"?
>
>It refers to an archaic British law referring to the size of the stick with

>which it was permissible for a man to beat his wife.
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