Remember the old claim that the phrase "rule of thumb" comes from a law about wife-beating?
It's absolute bollocks. For what it's worth, its first linkage with domestic violence came from a supposed ruling by Sir Francis Biller in 1782 saying it, but:
A) it was mocked to Hell and back even at the time,
B) There was no evidence that such a ruling actually being made (putting it roughly in the same category as J.D. Vance's couch-fucking adventures), and
C) It was already used for at least almost a century prior to that.
It was more likely related to, well,
![[Image: 640px-Width_of_man%27s_thumb_one_inch_ruler.png]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/db/Width_of_man%27s_thumb_one_inch_ruler.png/640px-Width_of_man%27s_thumb_one_inch_ruler.png)
Before units of measure were standardised, people in the cloth trade used the width of a finger as an approximation of an inch.
Indeed, using Google Translate to translate the words "thumb and inch" into many Romance languages, they're invariably either identical or clearly related. The only exceptions I've found so far are Romanian (but that seems to only be because they don't even have a word for "inch") and Sicilian (which is clearly just translating "Centimeter" for "inch", unless they just happened to come up with the name "centimetru" before the formation of the metric system).
It's absolute bollocks. For what it's worth, its first linkage with domestic violence came from a supposed ruling by Sir Francis Biller in 1782 saying it, but:
A) it was mocked to Hell and back even at the time,
B) There was no evidence that such a ruling actually being made (putting it roughly in the same category as J.D. Vance's couch-fucking adventures), and
C) It was already used for at least almost a century prior to that.
It was more likely related to, well,
Before units of measure were standardised, people in the cloth trade used the width of a finger as an approximation of an inch.
Indeed, using Google Translate to translate the words "thumb and inch" into many Romance languages, they're invariably either identical or clearly related. The only exceptions I've found so far are Romanian (but that seems to only be because they don't even have a word for "inch") and Sicilian (which is clearly just translating "Centimeter" for "inch", unless they just happened to come up with the name "centimetru" before the formation of the metric system).
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
![[Image: harmlesskitchen.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/yxR97P23/harmlesskitchen.png)
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
