Victims of folk etymology

[mmcirvin]

I'd never looked it up, but the popular claims that the old expletive bloody comes from a Christian blasphemy (especially the "by Our Lady" variant) always sounded like suspicious folk etymology to me. It turns out that the blasphemy stories are probably untrue, but go back a long way and may well have led to the word being considered extremely rude.

Something similar has been happening in recent years with the phrase rule of thumb, which is commonly said to originate from an old law about permissible forms of wife-beating. The etymology is bogus but is sufficiently widely known that the phrase now offends many people. I guess this kind of thing has been going on for a long time.

It's an interesting question what one does when these situations are developing. Is the loss of rule of thumb as a polite phrase a sufficiently dire outcome that it's best to stand against the tide and educate the ignorant when they take offense? Or is it better to accept that language changes for reasons that are not always rational, and that this phrase is now a casualty? I'd naively thought that the widespread Snopesish debunking of the rule of thumb story had removed the taint at least in some quarters, but I recently saw somebody take umbrage at it again. I suppose one could regard it as a stronger form of skunked term.

Comments

[manfire.livejournal.com]

I worry a little bit about "picnic" sometimes.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

My guess is that "picnic" will be more resilient, despite the particularly extreme offensiveness of its fake etymology, just because there really is no short synonym; "barbecue" and "outing", as that e-mail suggested, don't mean quite the same thing.

[piehead.livejournal.com]

Well "outing" is no better, being derived from "to out [a homosexual] from one's closest", or so an email told me!

[paraleipsis.livejournal.com]

"Picnic" will live, I think, for the reasons given below.

I cried a little inside the other day, though, when my perfectly decent psychiatrist, a very well-educated man of my father's generation, attempted to explain to me the Real Origin of the word "fuck."

[paraleipsis.livejournal.com]

Of course, they're actually the reasons given above, because I can't remember how LiveJournal works. This is why I am not allowed to comment pre-caffeine.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid I thought "fuck" was a recent schoolyard invention, since I'd never seen it in printed matter or heard adults use it. It was a particularly pure example of the Recency Illusion.

I read somewhere about somebody who, in his childhood, thought he and his friends had invented the word, but I can't remember who it was now.

[samantha2074.livejournal.com]

Stephen Fry? Once on QI he admitted that he was astonished the first time he heard his father use the word fuck, as he thought he and his brother had invented it.

"Picnic" will live

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

because the myth is nowhere near widespread enough to threaten it. I actually had no idea what Manfire was talking about, even though the Snopes debunking is from as far back as 1999! If it hasn't even reached me in that long, no way could it taint the word severely enough to make a difference. Besides, it just sounds like a stupid playground joke.

"Buck," on the other hand, has a more insidious problem. The idea that dollars were nicknamed for slaves used as currency may be a little silly, but the false assertion that "buck" was used to describe slaves as beasts of burden is alive and well. Again in Promise & Betrayal, something came up about "strapping young bucks," and the black woman reading the parts like Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Sojourner Truth commented on it as an offensive description of black men. None of us but her husband, an African and African-American historian, could convince her that it really was used complimentarily and carried no racial connotation.

Re: "Picnic" will live

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I was wondering about the Snopes explanation of "buck" as money, too; at least some dictionaries give its origin as unknown. I'd heard a very different story, that some version of the 10-dollar bill had a big X on it and was therefore referred to as a "sawbuck", and the 20 as a "double sawbuck". But I haven't found any recent corroboration for that and it is probably just another folk etymology.

Re: "Picnic" will live

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...hmm, the New Oxford American corroborates "sawbuck" but doesn't give this as related to "buck".

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I had to break a friend-of-a-friend's heart the other day by telling him that the folk etymology for rule of thumb, which he found so delightfully offensive, was actually not true.

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

i always thought "rule of thumb" was a carpentry term and never heard the fake/offensive history. interesting!

I think I was personally involved

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

in the revival of the beating-stick rule. In 1995, I participated in Carol Hanisch's dramatic reading Promise & Betrayal about the history of women's suffrage in the U.S. For it, she set two verses from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Suffrage Songs and Verses to music, for which I accompanied my wife on guitar. One was "The Women Do Not Want It," which contains the stanza:

Did we ask for veils and harems in the Oriental races?
Did we beseech to be "unclean," shut out of sacred places?
Did we beg for scolding bridles and ducking stools to come?
And clamour for the beating stick no thicker than your thumb?

We all knew this was not the origin of the expression and emphasized that to anyone who asked about it, but I'd be surprised if our performances weren't what started the chain of discussions that led to the column that led to the question that led to Fenrick's post. (Anybody know where Chris Peek lived? Googling for it got me another interesting ad:

I Live
Whatever you're looking for
you can get it on eBay.
www.eBay.com

I think they forgot to use a small "i.")

My favorite rule of thumb is one that a friend of my wife's had as a safety officer at Glaxo. When tanker drivers called from a crash scene, she would tell them her rule of thumb: "Hold up your thumb at arm's length. Can you see the truck? You're too close."

Re: I think I was personally involved

[manfire.livejournal.com]

By the way, your mention of the word "Oriental" reminds me of how some people, who I presume heard an eighth- or ninth-hand retelling of Edward Said's Orientalism argument, apparently think that the word "Oriental" literally means "the Other" rather than just "eastern".

[aderack.livejournal.com]

Nuh? I'd always just taken it literally; a rough yet basically accurate approximation, as you might use your thumb to measure something. Lots of cooking, for instance, uses fingers to measure out quantities.