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

[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.