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#21 (permalink) | |
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#22 (permalink) | |
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#23 (permalink) |
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There was a brand of very popular pills 1940s,1950s or so called "Carter's little liver pills". Since Carter sold so many of the pills, he must have had a lot of them. So it would be like saying "more *blank* than Borders has books" or something.
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#24 (permalink) | |
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Rule of thumb Rule of Thumb and Wife-Beating - Mostly a Myth The Straight Dope: Does "rule of thumb" refer to an old law permitting wife beating? http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-rul1.htm http://www.debunker.com/texts/ruleofthumb.html http://www.canlaw.com/rights/thumbrul.htm http://tafkac.org/language/etymology/rule_of_thumb.html http://userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/...leofthumb.html http://www.ifeminists.net/introducti...519wilson.html http://womenshistory.about.com/od/my...e_of_thumb.htm Last edited by mkl; 01-10-2009 at 04:16 PM. |
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#25 (permalink) |
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The bee knees....? I've never gotten that one.
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#27 (permalink) |
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Pretty much everyone from the web links you provided
![]() It was used in New Zealand to refer to this law, until fairly recently too. Pretty much all the law professors at the university I taught at would disagree with the Straight Dope Digest ![]() |
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#29 (permalink) | |
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That doesn't mean people didn't start recently (or within the last hundred years) referring to a new zealand law by that name, it just means the phrase "rule of thumb" did not START from a law about beating your wife. It is not the origin, it is something that came along afterward. There are no credible sources that say this phrase came from beating your wife, and a ton (all of them that I could find) that say it wasn't. And with that...a new phrase that applies , "to eat crow" |
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#30 (permalink) | |
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Brings up an interesting point tho. We are debating probably unknown origins. Almost any ancient saying has an unknown origin - they are just guessed at really. |
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