On Language; Misrule of Thumb
'We had to go by rule of thumb,' said Louis Katz, vice president of the George Washington University, explaining some funding problems to The gw Hatchet, an independent student newspaper.
This seemingly innocent figure of speech drew fire from a female student, Jess Brinn, who wrote: 'For the unaware, in English vernacular, rule of thumb refers to an obvious solution of doing things the way they have always been done. However, the phrase originated in English common law, where a man was permitted to beat his wife as long as the rod he used was no bigger than the width of his thumb.' She excoriated the 'misogynistic connotations ... disrespectful to women and men alike,' and while assuming the university official intended no disrespect, noted, 'We should all know what we're saying and where the phrases we use come from.'
So we should. The president of G.W., Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, sends me the student paper and asks, 'Can this possibly be true?'
The irate student could point to a brouhaha that arose in 1782, when Francis Buller, an English judge, was said to have made a remark in public along those lines. He was promptly jumped on by several caricaturists, including the first great political caricaturist, James Gillray; on Nov. 27 of that year, he depicted a berobed judge with an armload of sticks saying: 'Who wants a cure for a nasty wife? Here's a nice Family Amusement for Winter Evenings.' Meanwhile a wife is shouting, 'Murder!' and a husband is shouting back: 'Murder, hey? It's Law you Bitch! It's not bigger than my Thumb!'
In his time, Gillray set the standard for satiric savagery, making today's cartoonists like Paul Conrad and Pat Oliphant appear as gentle as Charles Schulz. The pioneering Gillray drew drawings that drew blood, taking on even the feared journalistic vituperator William Cobbett; by the time the caricaturist died insane in 1815, he had forever saddled the eminent jurist, Buller, with the name 'Judge Thumb.'
Thus, the notion that rule of thumb has its roots in the subjugation of women has a history. But a u.c.l.a. professor of English, Henry Ansgar Kelly, in the September 1994 Journal of Legal Education, titles his lengthy scholarly investigation 'Rule of Thumb and the Folklaw [pun intended] of the Husband's Stick.' His conclusion about the origin of the phrase in wife-beating: 'Rule of thumb has received a bad rap.'
That's because its first appearance in print is cited in the o.e.d. as 1692, nearly a century before Gillray's 'Judge Thumb.' Sir William Hope, in 'The Compleat Fencing Master,' wrote, 'What he doth, he doth by rule of Thumb, and not by Art.' It was reported in 1721 in Kelly's Scottish Proverbs: 'No Rule so good as Rule of Thumb.' The meaning is 'a roughly practical method, or an assertion based on experience.'
Origin? Could be that carpenters used the width of their thumbs to approximate an inch, or that artists held up their thumbs to gain perspective on a distant object, or that gardeners used their green thumbs as guides to depth of seeding.
The idea that rule of thumb is derived from an early form of spousal abuse is in error. It's 'folk etymology,' amusing, even plausible with its first citation two centuries old, but inaccurate. (The gender-sensitive will not, however, denounce it sexistly as an old wives' tale.)
WANDERING WORDS
'When I use a word,' said Humpty-Dumpty, ' ...it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
That is the voice of the hard-edged prescriptivist, in the quotation most often cited by those of us in the usage dodge to all of you semantic drifters who let meanings go fuzzy.
And yet years later, Lewis Carroll, author of the book in which the Mother Goose character Humpty-Dumpty makes that linguistic assertion, wrote, 'You know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them.'
That takes the opposite view; descriptivists, like most lexicographers, hold that words have a range of meanings that change with the times, and can carry messages different from what the speakers choose them to mean.
I found that apparent conflict in Carroll's thinking about language in a recent article by Robert K. Merton, the great Columbia sociologist, now 85 and the proud father of this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in economics.
'Here is Humpty-Dumpty speaking for the would-be exactitude of scientific denotation,' writes Merton, 'intent on abolishing overtones and undertones with all their interpreted ambiguities. And there is his reflective creator speaking, many years later, of the shades of meaning to be found in humanistic connotation, with its often more evident variety of meanings we need not wittingly mean.'
Barnacles attach themselves to words, as crustaceans to ships' hulls, freighting a term with meaning beyond the ship itself. Merton found a resonation of Carroll's ambiguity in the works of Henry Adams: 'No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean,' wrote the historian Adams, 'for words are slippery and thought is viscous.'
Pity about the choice of the last word in that quotation; Adams meant 'adhesive, sticky,' still the dictionary definition, but most people now associate viscous with viscosity, having to do with the flow of oil in a cold engine. Besides, viscous looks like vicious. Better to have written 'words are slippery and thought is sticky.'
Why sticky and not tacky, which also means 'adhesive'? Because tacky has been barnacled by usage with another sense as 'low-class, unstylish, icky.' Not a word that means what I choose it to mean.