Some lies just won't die

British police officers have been "advised" to stop using certain phrases or asking certain questions, to make sure they don't commit the cardinal sin of offending anybody. The Daily Telegraph concentrates on the asinine suggestion that the police refrain from asking people whether they're married - this is offensive to gays, evidently - but here's the one that really caught my attention:

Apparently innocuous terms such as "rule of thumb" and "nitty gritty" were found to be unacceptable because of their historical origins.

Rule of thumb was deemed sexist because it dates from a law which forbade husbands from beating their wives with an implement thicker than a thumb.

Nitty gritty was used by slave traders to describe the women or the remains at the bottom of transport ships that were covered in lice or grit.

I'm not sure about the origins of "nitty gritty", though I must wonder just how hypersensitive you must be to be offended by something so obscure. But "rule of thumb" has nothing to do with a (nonexistent) rule which allowed men to beat their wives:

"Rule of thumb" probably came from the use of the thumb as a convenient measuring tool, the distance to the first knuckle usually being about one inch. Even "The Bias-Free Word Finder," the bible of the Politically Correct Language Guardians among us, considers the wife-beating theory implausible and notes that it first surfaced in a 1986 letter to the editor in "Ms." magazine. So I guess the first "rule of thumb" in these cases is "Check your sources, lest they be hokum."

The "wife-beating" explanation has been debunked time and time again - but it doesn't seem to matter in a world where PC moral guardians want to believe the phrase is linked to the evil dead white male patriarchy. (I once had a discussion with a fellow lawyer about this very subject, and she insisted "rule of thumb" must have something to do with hitting your wife, because Gloria Steinem mentioned it in a book.)

And anyway, how people feel is more important than whether their feelings are based on fact. Back in university - I can't remember whether it was MUN or UNB - a writer in the school paper protested the use of the word "history", which was supposedly sexist. ("His story," get it?) Thing is, she admitted the word didn't really mean "his story" - but she wrote that this didn't really matter, because it sounded sexist.

Ever have these moments when you want to give up on society altogether and become a backwoods hermit? I have them several times a week.

Update: the "slave ships" origin of "nitty-gritty" is also complete BS.

Surprise!

Posted by damian at January 19, 2004 11:21 AM