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"Rule of Thumb." It refers to an old law in England back in the 17th century when it was OK to beat your wife with a stick or a cane, as long as it was no thicker than your thumb.
Do ya think the ACLU would object if we tried to get a petition goin' to bring it back?
I think that one's an urban legend.
From Wikipedia:
[b]elief in the existence of a "rule of thumb" law to excuse spousal abuse can be traced as far back as 1782, the year that James Gillray published his satirical cartoon Judge Thumb. The cartoon lambastes Sir Francis Buller, a British judge, for allegedly ruling that a man may legally beat his wife, provided that he used a stick no thicker than his thumb, although it is questionable whether Buller ever made such a pronouncement (poor record-keeping for trial transcripts in that era make it difficult to determine whether such a ruling may have existed). In the United States, legal decisions in Mississippi (1824) and North Carolina (1868 and 1874) make reference to—and reject—an unnamed "old doctrine" or "ancient law" by which a man was allowed to beat his wife with a stick no wider than his thumb.
Baseball has probably contributed more idioms to American English than any other source. There are literally hundreds of them. In addition to the more obvious ones:
Southpaw, left handed, arises from the fact that the pitcher faced west on a baseball diamond, so the batter would not face into the sun in afternoon games.
Rain check, originally the stub of a baseball ticket that entitled the holder to a replacement ticket if the game was rained out. Before baseball, most games were played right through rain.
This isn't so much a phrase or word but I thought something really interesting. I was doing some research on typefaces when I stumbled on an essay about something so simple and so taken for granted that it's impossible to reverse our perception of it: word spacing.
Paul Saenger has been writing in depth on the subject for years. Word spacing was never conventionally employed in times earlier than the 1100s, actually predating the printing press itself. Literacy and familiarity with the text was presupposed, therefore written traditions, used only to aid in oration, were conventionally without spacing, punctuation or cases. All the words ran together. It was only when Latin speaking clergy encountered the utterly linguistically foreign Celts that word spacing was employed to ease translation. This also led to more efficient transcription, as monks had til then been forced to limit lines of text to shorter, more easily memorized character series.
Remember, literature was an entirely oral tradition. If you can believe it, there was no such inclination as silent reading, sitting down and reading--to oneself--a work of epic poetry, a story, or a declaration. Because words set to the tangible page weren't structured to that purpose, only for recitation. It's word spacing that was a watershed innovation in our perception of language itself, and communication. Seems impossible to think without it.
I recently heard "leading them down the primrose path" and found out it is from Hamlet in one instance meaning that someone is leading you down a path of destruction knowingly or a flagrant libertine (my paraphrasing with the second definition is not to hot).
"Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out" started being used after the Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy movie Pat & Mike came out, which means to get out quickly. There's a scene in the kitchen where they're both trying to trying to enter and exit, and the door keeps hitting them both on the butt.
Last edited by CJFinnegan; 03-29-2010 at 04:53 PM..
Reason: Used the word "movie" twice
"Pulling out all the stops" comes from the use of pipe organs, on which stops are used to control the air in the pipes. Pulling them out further increases the volume.
And since you remind me, "zounds" is a contraction of "God's wounds."
At rather the other end of the religious spectrum as regards phrases, "amen" is actually an acronym for the Hebrew--or more accurately, the Aramaic--el melech ne'eman (God is a faithful King).
And since you remind me, "zounds" is a contraction of "God's wounds."
At rather the other end of the religious spectrum as regards phrases, "amen" is actually an acronym for the Hebrew--or more accurately, the Aramaic--el melech ne'eman (God is a faithful King).
I knew about zounds! There was a music studio in New Jersey with that name that I used to see from my train. I thought it was a clever name.
"In A Pickle"-This came from the Middle Ages and trade across the North Sea. Pekel was a solution used for brine (pickeling), for flavoring and preserving foods. "To sit in the pickle"=a troublesome situation.
How trends come and go. But so much quicker nowadays that I don't think fads have such staying power as to germinate many resilient words. Words that are basically fun, that is. Sadly, I think "babydaddy" is here for the long haul. Ironically, "LOL".
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