What is happening with written media? These are people who supposedly were schooled in the fine art of writing articles in a precise and elegant manner. Yet we see stupid stuff like this: 12 Surprisingly Offensive Words You Need to Erase from Your Vocabulary.
I click the link and the first offensive word is not a word but two…huh? I check the whole list and there are only five single words, the rest are what you call expressions.
But the one that caught my ire was this one:
Rue of Thumb
There’s a lot of controversy around the origins of this term. You know it to mean a generally accepted principle. It’s said to derive from laws in England and America dating back to the 1600s. These laws are said to have stated that a man could beat his wife with any stick no wider than his thumb. Hence, the rule of thumb. Scholars have searched but they can’t find any precise proof for this origin. That doesn’t mean that domestic violence isn’t a problem. Here’s what experts wish you knew about it.
So, there is only a legend about where the term comes from. Nobody can find where the damned term comes from, but since we need to check mark the box of “domestic violence” we are going to go ahead and bullshit our way in.
When I was a kid, I was a faithful Reader’ Digest reader. I had the stacks of old issues all over my room. But by the early 90s, it became a printed clown show, barely a shadow of what it once was. It seems the new century has not helped improve much what passes for editorial oversight.
Pretty soon the pc clowns will put out newspapers and magazines with just blank pages so as they dont “offend anyone”… what horsepucky
Virtue signalling? Idiot signalling would be a better description; i.e. I am a really useful idiot.
Freaking idiots. The classic rule of thumb is that the width of your thumb is close enough to an inch as to not make that much of a difference in the rough and ready old days of joinery.
What idiocy. A lack of evidence for the etymology of “rule of thumb” has nothing to do with denying the existence of domestic violence.
As a rule of thumb, when asked/demanded to kowtow to hysterical, moronic, basket-case imbeciles, my response is simple: “No can do.”
And whoever heard of “tiger” being used as a euphemism for a black man?
In all seriousness, here’s my new working definition of “virtue signalling”: The feeling of outrage at insulted-in-fact parties’ lack of outrage, and demanding reparations in said parties’ names that they themselves do not want, all for one’s own benefit.
Honestly, even if you found a place where “paddy wagon” was still in common use, have you ever met a person of Irish descent who is offended by the phrase? (Besides which, in the five minutes I devoted to a Google search, I only found one source [Word-Detective.com] that referenced the RD-cited origin, and even that acknowledged an alternate explanation that multiple other sources cited: the disproportionately-large number of Irish-American police officers in big cities at the time, i.e. “paddy wagon” is a vehicle driven by “paddies”, not picking them up.)
My final thought on this one: It’s interesting, but not at all surprising, that the people on the Left who insist that these words’ and phrases’ origins are offensive and cannot be separated from their modern definitions, are the same people on the Left who insist the plain language of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights is malleable and subject to modern interpretation.
You cannot have it both ways. Either words mean what they’ve always meant (in which case “shall not be infringed” means what it says), or definitions are fluid and open to interpretation (in which case “eenie meenie miney mo” is not an offensive child’s game).
Which is it?