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.

[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."

[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.