![]() ![]() And there is his reflective creator speaking, many years later, of the shades of meaning to be found in humanistic connotation, with its often more evident variety of meanings we need not wittingly mean.''īarnacles attach themselves to words, as crustaceans to ships' hulls, freighting a term with meaning beyond the ship itself. ''Here is Humpty-Dumpty speaking for the would-be exactitude of scientific denotation,'' writes Merton, ''intent on abolishing overtones and undertones with all their interpreted ambiguities. (The gender-sensitive will not, however, denounce it sexistly as an old wives' tale.) It's ''folk etymology,'' amusing, even plausible with its first citation two centuries old, but inaccurate. The idea that rule of thumb is derived from an early form of spousal abuse is in error. ![]() Origin? Could be that carpenters used the width of their thumbs to approximate an inch, or that artists held up their thumbs to gain perspective on a distant object, or that gardeners used their green thumbs as guides to depth of seeding. as 1692, nearly a century before Gillray's ''Judge Thumb.'' Sir William Hope, in ''The Compleat Fencing Master,'' wrote, ''What he doth, he doth by rule of Thumb, and not by Art.'' It was reported in 1721 in Kelly's Scottish Proverbs: ''No Rule so good as Rule of Thumb.'' The meaning is ''a roughly practical method, or an assertion based on experience.'' ![]() That's because its first appearance in print is cited in the o.e.d. professor of English, Henry Ansgar Kelly, in the September 1994 Journal of Legal Education, titles his lengthy scholarly investigation ''Rule of Thumb and the Folklaw of the Husband's Stick.'' His conclusion about the origin of the phrase in wife-beating: ''Rule of thumb has received a bad rap.'' Thus, the notion that rule of thumb has its roots in the subjugation of women has a history. ![]() The pioneering Gillray drew drawings that drew blood, taking on even the feared journalistic vituperator William Cobbett by the time the caricaturist died insane in 1815, he had forever saddled the eminent jurist, Buller, with the name ''Judge Thumb.'' In his time, Gillray set the standard for satiric savagery, making today's cartoonists like Paul Conrad and Pat Oliphant appear as gentle as Charles Schulz. 27 of that year, he depicted a berobed judge with an armload of sticks saying: ''Who wants a cure for a nasty wife? Here's a nice Family Amusement for Winter Evenings.'' Meanwhile a wife is shouting, ''Murder!'' and a husband is shouting back: ''Murder, hey? It's Law you Bitch! It's not bigger than my Thumb!'' He was promptly jumped on by several caricaturists, including the first great political caricaturist, James Gillray on Nov. The irate student could point to a brouhaha that arose in 1782, when Francis Buller, an English judge, was said to have made a remark in public along those lines. The president of G.W., Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, sends me the student paper and asks, ''Can this possibly be true?'' disrespectful to women and men alike,'' and while assuming the university official intended no disrespect, noted, ''We should all know what we're saying and where the phrases we use come from.'' However, the phrase originated in English common law, where a man was permitted to beat his wife as long as the rod he used was no bigger than the width of his thumb.'' She excoriated the ''misogynistic connotations. This seemingly innocent figure of speech drew fire from a female student, Jess Brinn, who wrote: ''For the unaware, in English vernacular, rule of thumb refers to an obvious solution of doing things the way they have always been done. 'We had to go by rule of thumb,'' said Louis Katz, vice president of the George Washington University, explaining some funding problems to The gw Hatchet, an independent student newspaper. ![]()
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