Date: Fri, 7 Nov 1997 23:06:03 -0500
From: Gregory {Greg} Downing downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]IS2.NYU.EDU
Subject: Re: Rima's rule of thumb
At 03:25 PM 11/7/97 -0500, you wrote:
I hardly think the wife beating story is a fallacy!
I have read in several publications that the "rule of
thumb" originates from an English common law dictating the width of a
strap a husband could use to discipline his wife. The husband would use
his thumb as a rule to measure the width of the strap, hence the expression.
I have to question the validity of the beer story as a "rule of thumb". The
purpose of testing the heat has nothing to do with the thumb really. No
more than testing a baby's bottle could be called the "rule of wrist".
Granted, the popularity of the wife beating story doesn't mean it is
true but it is more believable than the "fingering the yeast
story"!!!
This is dueling folk-etymologies. I've read somewhere some analysis of the
beating-stick idea, something along the lines that in no legal record or law
case has anyone ever found one reference to such a rule, and how could there
be a legal rule that is never recorded in any legal code or mentioned in a
recorded law-case? Common law is especially long-lived and thus prone to
leaving traces in records. If such a law existed, there'd be have been tons
of court-cases hinging on the issue of whether a given beating was or was
not inflicted with a stick of the legally allowed size.
But without being an expert on this bit of lore, all I can add is that if
you read the OED2 cites of "rule of thumb" (back to 1692) there's no mention
of or hints at beating anywhere. There is however almost always a sense that
"rule of thumb" means something inexact -- hardly the sense of the word in
the "beating" account, where the "rule of thumb" refers to the exact size
something can legally be. I have heard accounts that tie "rule of thumb" to
sailing (measuring the needed thickness of a rope for a given task when as a
sailor you have no ruler) and tailoring (using the width of the thumb to
measure without a ruler or the like -- get it? *rule* of thumb.... Cf. OED2
rock n.3, meaning 1b, where "rock/rack of eye and rule of thumb" is a
tailors' phrase for inexact measurement).
If anyone has the *real* story and the evidence, maybe s/he'd cough it up.
The stick-story seems to have the same kind of origin as "history" = "his
story," which means it says a lot about our cultural interests and guilts in
the later 20C, but nothing at all about the actual origin of the phrase,
which is the topic at hand in real etymology.
Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nyu.edu or downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]is2.nyu.edu