Does any one know the origin of the saying… Rule Of Thumb?
Although the precise origin is not known, “Rule of Thumb” has always meant doing something by judgement and experience rather than precise measure. The most likely explanation is from either brewing or baking, when it’s thought that a master brewer (or baker) could judge the action of yeast simply by testing it’s temperature with his thumb. The story about the stick was invented by a feminist author in the 1970’s by the wholly unsupported (and frankly dishonest) assertion that a single case of a judge who ruled that a husband had the right to beat his wife “within reason, for the purpose of correction” and the phrase “rule of thumb” were related. Unfortunately no-one thought to actually check her sources, and her story was accepted at face value for decades (even leading to a new field of study: “Feminist Semiotics”) before scholars tried to retrace her sources and found that she had concocted the whole ‘history”. The embarassment this caused to the Feminist movement led many Feminist
