news:4c381c37-c066-4a68-be08-34f3c04ecc3a@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
Michael Pendragon wrote:
Let's all talk about Bob
Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with >> > music:
"Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946)[1] is an American
poet, singer-songwriter, and visual artist..."
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
"Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016)
was
a Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and novelist. His work
often
explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal
relationships..."
I'm with Stuart on this one. Folk rock and poetry are entirely
different categories. You and your friends seem to think that
excluding
folkies from the title of "poet" constitutes some sort of negative,
qualitative judgement. It is nothing of the sort. Bob Dylan is a
highly influential folkie. He's not a good poet. He's not a bad
poet.
He's not a poet at all.
Everywhere but you says Dylan is a poet:
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Bob_Dylan
"Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941) is an American poet, singer-songwriter,
musician, and painter..."
Rule of Thumb:
If a song lyric can stand on its own, it's poetry.
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You're an English expert, Michael...
Do you know why the phrase "rule of thumb" is offensive to a great number
of
people?
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1998-04-17/news/1998107056_1_rule-of-thumb-phrase-rule-false-etymology
The misunderstood 'rule of thumb'
Misconception: Many feminists for years thought the phrase "rule of thumb" referred to British common law's tolerance of wife-beating.
Sun Journal, April 17, 1998|By Stephanie Shapiro | Stephanie Shapiro,SUN STAFF
Sharon Fenick first heard the figure of speech "rule of thumb" cited as a sexist pejorative during her freshman year at Harvard seven years ago.
The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse
permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as the rod used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries, the term had evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
"It sounded very believable to me," says the 24-year-old Fenick, now in her third year of law school at the University of Chicago. "I was having my
first contact with feminist thought and [the explanation] was very
impressive to me. It was one of those things I really remember that spread around. I can't remember when I found out it wasn't true."
Unlike Fenick, untold historians, feminists and legal experts are unaware that the folk etymology for "rule of thumb" is false. For them, the notion
of a "rule of thumb" makes perfect sense, originating as it allegedly does from a legal system they see as misogynistic.
In January, wordsmith William Safire debunked "the rule of thumb's" false etymology in his New York Times Magazine column. The phrase had been called to his attention by the president of George Washington University, where a female student had denounced its use by an administrator remarking on budget problems in the student newspaper.
In gender- and women's-studies courses across the country, the phrase is still cited as an example of unconscious acceptance and tacit condoning of sexist policy. A computer search for the use of "rule of thumb" and "wife"
in the same newspaper sentence reveals many letters to the editor in recent years from women irate about the casual appearance of the figure of speech
in news articles. In a televised news analysis about domestic violence in 1994, even commentator Cokie Roberts noted the misconception.
The false etymology persists despite the Oxford English Dictionary definition: "A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical method." The OED dates the phrase's first reference to 1692.
In the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, "rule of thumb" is additionally defined as a method by which brewers once tested the
temperature of a batch of beer: They dipped a thumb in the brew.
During her first year of law school, Fenick, a wordsmith herself, was determined to unravel the history of the "rule of thumb." Did the phrase
stem from a specific rule? Was there such a rule? Even if there wasn't a rule, did an infamous judge's ruling establish "thumbstick" guidelines for would-be wife beaters?
She discovered that while "rule of thumb" was not accepted law, there was evidence aplenty that the British legal system and the American legal system it inspired were unkind to women. "I found out that in the 1800s [wife beating] really was a debatable proposition," she says.
Wife beating is acknowledged in Blackstone's "Commentaries," and many court rulings sanctioned the practice. But whether the "rule of thumb" was
accepted as law was a separate matter.
Fenick traced the earliest possible reference to the 17th century, when one Dr. Marmaduke Coghill, an Irish judge, held that a man who had beaten his wife "with such a switch as the one he held in his hand" was within his matrimonial privilege.
In the 18th century a judge named Francis Buller, dubbed "Judge Thumb" by
the famous caricaturist James Gillray, was said to have allowed that a man could beat his wife, as long as the punitive stick was no thicker than his thumb. (A witty countess was said to have asked the judge to measure her husband's thumb exactly, so that she might know the precise extent of his privilege.)
Fenick also found three 19th-century cases in America that mention the "rule of thumb," including an 1868 ruling in North Carolina that "the defendant
had a right to whip his wife with a switch no larger than his thumb."
Buller's "thumbstick" opinion and the three American rulings Fenick found were intriguing -- and damning -- but did not constitute definitive proof that the rule of thumb was derived from British common law.
As Fenick, encouraged by a law professor, considered publishing her
findings, she found that Henry Ansgar Kelly, a University of California English professor, had beaten her to the punch. His "Rule of Thumb and the Folklaw of the Husband's Stick" appeared in the September 1994 Journal of Legal Education.
Kelly, much to Fenick's disappointment, had covered the same territory as she. (Although she proudly observes that his article overlooked the earliest reference to "rule of thumb" by Coghill.) Three and half years later, Safire would rely entirely on Kelly's article to make his case in his column.
Fenick's efforts were not in vain, however. In response to a query from a correspondent to the alt.folkore.urban newsgroup linked to the Urban Legends Web site, Fenick posted her article where it is now part of the site's permanent archives. Since its inception, the site has expanded its mission from probing the genesis and spread of urban legends to "confirming or disproving beliefs and facts of all kinds, including origin of vernacular."
"Rule of thumb" and other figures of speech can work much the same way that urban legends do: They may appear mysteriously, spread spontaneously and contain elements of humor or horror. And, like urban legends, a figure of speech may contain a grain of emotional, if not actual, truth.
Thus it was easy at first for Fenick and others to believe that the "rule of thumb" was founded in common law. Patricia A. Turner, a University of California at Davis folklorist, well understands how a falsehood can acquire the mantle of truth.
In "I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture," Turner examines the way allegations of forced birth control, corporate collusion with the Ku Klux Klan, drug distribution targeted at urban areas and other anti-black conspiracy theories circulating in the African-American community are based on racist realities and serve as a form of resistance against white oppression.
The same theory can be applied to the rule of thumb, Turner says. A text may be proved to be inaccurate or false, but "if it reflects some deeper truth
in society, it doesn't go away." The term "rule of thumb" may "not have that specific etymological origin, but men have dominated women in workplaces and in homes and in virtually every setting. It speaks to a deeper truth."
Students of women's history who want to research possibly apocryphal ideas are also at a disadvantage because they "don't have the paper trail that
more mainstream areas of academic discipline have," Turner says. "Sometimes it's more difficult to get to the bottom of something."
That said, Turner acknowledges that it is "very sloppy for an academic to pass on misinformation." Once a theory such as the inaccurate history of the "rule of thumb" has been debunked, it can backfire on those promoting it,
she says. "If someone has read it who knows it is false, everything gets discredited on that level. So based on one falsehood, a whole history can be challenged."
That is what concerned scholars and social critics say happened when Christina Hoff Sommers debunked the "rule of thumb" in her 1994 book, "Who Stole Feminism? How Women have Betrayed Women." Sommers finds the earliest misuse of the phrase in a 1976 National Organization for Women report and uses it to bolster her case against domestic-violence statistics.
The feminist rush to brandish the "rule of thumb" as justification for their crusade, Turner suggests, may inadvertently have provided Sommers and her sympathizers with the ideal ammunition to discredit the same cause.
As for Fenick, she received a nice letter from Kelly, who learned RTC of her research after the Safire piece ran. She has written him back, and hopes to hear soon what he thinks about her Coghill reference.
Pub Date: 4/17/98
----------------------------------------------------
Found in my drafts file, worth archiving.
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
Like I've said before, if it is sickly sweet and sappy... it is probably a Pat Boone song.
HTH and HAND.
🙂
Will Dockery wrote:
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
Like I've said before, if it is sickly sweet and sappy... it is probably a Pat Boone song.
HTH and HAND.
🙂
I am not too big of a fan of Pat Boone...!
My drawing of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg...
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10159616377009363&set=g.629438503762910
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and
Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with
music:
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Patti_Smith
"Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946)[1] is an American
poet, singer-songwriter, and visual artist..."
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
"Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016) was >> a Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and novelist. His work often >> explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal
relationships..."
Bob Dylan is a
highly influential folkie
Everywhere but you says Dylan is a poet:
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Bob_Dylan
"Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941) is an American poet, singer-songwriter,
musician, and painter..."
Rule of Thumb:
If a song lyric can stand on its own, it's poetry
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/dylan-and-cohen-poets-of-rock-and-roll/introduction
*******************to claim that it is authentic, that the voice of poetry has a greater claim to be heard than the nonpoetic. Paul Garon has made the emphatic and stipulative pronouncement that all blues is self-evidently poetry and that those who think otherwise must be
Poets of a Generation
What remains true is that, if Dylan is, sui generis, the greatest song-writer of the age, Leonard Cohen is still the only name that can seriously he mentioned in the same breath.
Poetry is an evaluative descriptive word. It is descriptive in that it signifies an art form that, while being readily identifiable, retains a sufficient degree of ambiguity to have its meaning contested. To claim that something is poetry may often be
se that do not. Garon is contemptuously dismissive of those who do not agree with the surrealist position and completely hostile to academics in the formal sense, suggesting that the real business of thinking has to go on outside of the constraints ofacademia. Not only does Garon wish to compel us to accept that the blues is poetry, but that 2it is better poetry than that produced by T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, or Allen Ginsberg.[3]
One way to address the dilemma of resolving what is and what is not poetry is to subscribe to what Cohen says: poetry is a verdict rather than an intention, meaning that it is others who bestow the title of poetry on the poet or poem. If this is to bea criterion, it is undeniable that numerous critics do describe both Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen as lyric poets. To get a definitive answer to the question What makes Dylan Thomas’s “Vision and Prayer,” in which the words are shaped into a triangle,
It is nevertheless the case that the concepts of poetry and art carry with them favorable evaluative connotations. They are what philosopher Maurice Cranston called “hooray words.” To call something poetic, or artistic, is deliberately to invokethis positive sense of approval. The positive is not, of course, universal, and for some, poetry, and the label poetry, may be tainted by unpleasant associations with school and the “high” culture of the establishment. Jonzi D., for example, found
, and Hugues Aufray. Brel, for example, strongly influenced Rod McKuen. This French tradition found in the songwriting circles of Montreal and Quebec was quickly identified as the milieu of Cohen’s artistry: “Intense, dark-haired Leonard Cohen,acclaimed by some as Canada’s leading poet, ends his poetry readings with guitar in hand, singing in the style of the French-Canadian chansonnier.”[5]
Poets themselves have not been averse to cross over into song. Homer, for example, was chanted, and so were the Scandinavian epics. Frank Davey argues that poetry and music have historically been closely allied. The heroic poetry of Anglo-Saxons isvery likely to have been chanted to the accompaniment of a harpist.[6] Shakespeare liberally punctuated his plays with song. Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, are sustained by intermittent interludes of song. William Blake’s
Dylan’s influence on the younger generation and their imitation of him that was the important factor.[7][8] Allen Ginsberg, a great admirer of Blake, sang “The Tiger” to harmonium accompaniment and recited some of his own poems, such as “FatherDeath,” to music. Much of the force of Ginsberg’s poetry is in the performance, and without the mantric intonation and musical accompaniment, the words often appear dead on the page. Inspired by Dylan and Happy Traum, a leading figure in the folk
The book The Message: Crossing the Tracks between Poetry and Pop, which celebrated the theme of the 1999 National Poetry Day, spearheaded by the Poetry Society of Great Britain, explored the relation between pop lyrics and poetry, and the contributors,with varying degrees of equivocation, conclude that there is none. Lyrics are distinctive in their way, often gaining their particular force in the performance, the combination of intonation and notation, betraying a dependency on the music that is
ory of pop than the contributions of all of the sad-eyed singer-songwriters of the 1970s.[9] He calls it “the aesthetic of the artful artlessness.”which they have been educated and impose rationality, aesthetic value, and depth of meaning on a form of expression devoid of all such things. Instead, it is the extralinguistic elements that refuse to succumb to content analysis that constitute the pop
4
Indeed, there may be a great deal of mileage in Simon Reynold’s view that popular music gains its power not from the depth and meaning of its lyrics, but from its sheer noise.[10] The critics who analyze it import criteria from the higher culture in
ng give character and effect: “The music provides a rhythm, a beat, an emotional ambience.”[12] The arrangements of songs change, of course, and the mood conveyed, the images projected, and the context invoked take on different nuances, but Dylanis notorious for setting his lyrics to completely different accompaniments, transforming the effect, if not the content, of the words.
Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen have both been hailed as great poets of their generation. Donald Henahan, commenting on Cohen, asserts that “on the alienation scale, he rates somewhere between [Arthur] Schopenhauer and Bob Dylan, two other prominentpoets of pessimism.”[13] Playboy described Cohen as both the minstrel and the poet laureate of his generation.[14] Harry Rasky, the filmmaker, who produced the film The Song of Leonard Cohen, bestowed on him the dubious honor of being “the first
ess of the language, and the relevance of the words in different contexts.[16]that would keep it alive as “good minor poetry.” Combining pop singing with poetry, however, was barely compatible, and the former had had a deleterious affect on Cohen’s poetic development. Woodcock cites an interview with Cohen in Saturday Night
5
George Woodcock, for example, maintained in 1970 that Cohen had become something of an instant Keats, combining the romanticism with the fame that Keats did not enjoy until a half century after his death. Woodcock held that Cohen’s poetry had virtues
Acknowledged poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, and Federico GarcĂa Lorca had sought to restore poetry’s place among the lived experiences of the everyday life of a community. The Beat poets emulated them in this aspiration. Kenneth Rexrothdeclared that intellectuals, that is, college professors, had hijacked poetry, taking it out of the hands of the people. Poetry in the oral traditions of Homer and Beowulf were show business, and the Beat poets aspired to reestablish the connection.
embittered, ranting about a stringy kid with an electric guitar drawing a bigger audience than a major poet such as himself.[19] In an interview with Robert Shelton, Ferlinghetti acknowledged that Dylan has a poet’s imagination, but added, “I stillthink he needs that guitar.”[20] In the March 1966 issue of Ramparts, Ralph J. Gleason praised Dylan for doing the impossible: for taking poetry out of the classroom and bringing it to the jukebox, from reaching a small circle of friends to having a
What is undoubtedly the case, whether one confirms or denies Dylan’s and Cohen’s claims to be poets, is that they achieved what their mentors 6failed to accomplish. They introduced a new audience to the world of poetry, an audience whose horizonswere broadened and who contributed to a significant increase in the sales of poetry books. Rexroth acknowledged that “the importance of Dylan is that he is imitated right and left. It is a very important phenomenon that in the new-leisure society of
The 1999 National Poetry Day, October 7, had as one of its principal themes the relation between poetry and song lyrics. Andrew Motion chose as his favorite lyric of all time the opening lines from Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna”: “Ain’t itjust like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet.” (Incidentally, it is also Bono’s favorite line from a Dylan song.[23]) The Poetry Society of Great Britain commissioned Roddy Lumsden to explore the relation between pop lyrics
sion with change.with Keats and Wordsworth.[25] Paul Williams described Dylan’s work as “great art.”[26] Leonard Cohen suggested in 1985 that Dylan “is the Picasso of song,” and in 1988 in an interview in the Musician Magazine, he again likened Dylan to Picasso
Very early in Dylan’s career Robert Shelton, the folk music critic of the New York Times, described him as “one of the musical-poetic geniuses of our time.”[24] The literary critic Frank Kermode caused a stir in the 1960s when he compared Dylan
The claim that Dylan was a great poet of his generation precipitated a heated debate to which critics and academics contributed. Many academics were disdainful of the claim, suggesting that Dylan was a self-conscious second-rate imitator of JackKerouac, who appealed to the feebleminded who knew nothing of poetry. Whatever the merits of the counterclaims, it cannot be denied that Dylan made poetry popular, elevated from its secluded shade in a corner of academia, into the horizon of a new and
At about the same time that Bob Dylan was listening to American folk and blues he started reading Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Frank O’Hara. Dylan had come to lyric poetry through Woody Guthrie, who Billy Bragg has suggested is the bestAmerican lyric poet since Walt Whitman. In 1960, a friend in Minneapolis, Dave Whitaker, who is credited with having brought about Dylan’s first great transformation, from the reluctant university fraternity boy on the margins of the in crowd to one of
In Greenwich Village the poetic influences were extended. Folk musician Dave Van Ronk stimulated Dylan’s interest in the work of the French symbolists. He particularly liked Rimbaud. Rimbaud was a rebel who wanted to reach a wider popular audiencewith his poetry, in which he questioned all types of establishment authority, including church and state. Like Woody Guthrie, he almost lived the life of a vagrant and drank very heavily. In addition, Rimbaud indulged heavily in marijuana and opium. He
n a pose almost identical to that in a photograph of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas on the same New York street, was involved with a group of actors who staged Brecht plays at the Circle in the Square Theatre in Greenwich Village. She helped out by paintingthe scenery for a production of Brecht on Brecht, and Dylan would go down and watch the six performers rehearsing the poems and the songs Brecht wrote with Kurt Weill. Rotolo has commented that Dylan was most affected by Lotte 8Lenya’s signature song, â
Rotolo was widely read and introduced Dylan to such poets as François Villon, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Robert Graves, whom he met in London when the BBC flew Dylan over to appear in Madhouse on Castle Street. Graves wasn’t really interested in apushy, scruffy little American trying to thrust his poetry under his nose. Dylan was deeply offended and went back to New York, describing Graves as an “old bastard.” Graves, in fact, had been very rude by turning to four musicians and starting a
Dylan consciously tried to go beyond the rhyming of words that was typical of most song forms. He once said in an interview that he wrote his songs so that they could be read or recited even without the beat or melody.[33] As early as 1963 he found thesong form restrictive, a medium through which he felt that he was no longer fully able to express his thoughts and feelings, or in which he could draw upon the wealth of influences to which he had now become exposed. Initially his response was to turn
Much of the early work is loosely autobiographical, including his “Life in a Stolen Moment,” printed on the Town Hall concert program, and “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie,” which he recited as an encore to the concert and culminates in print inhis 1966 book Tarantula. In the dust jacket notes by Michael Gray the book is described as “surrealism on speed, a phantasmagoric trip through America.” Scattered throughout are the more readable prose poems in the form of letters, as well as an
Dylan even experimented with writing plays at the end of 1963, as a letter from him to Broadside magazine testifies, and what appears to be a fragment of the utterly unmemorable play he refers to was discovered....
********************************************
General-Zod wrote:
Will Dockery wrote:
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
Like I've said before, if it is sickly sweet and sappy... it is probably a Pat Boone song.
HTH and HAND.
🙂
I am not too big of a fan of Pat Boone...!
My drawing of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg...
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10159616377009363&set=g.629438503762910
I do kind of love Pat Boone's cover of John Stewart:
https://youtu.be/XSpj3l-_MQY
"Earl Browder" wrote in message
news:4c381c37-c066-4a68-be08-34f3c04ecc3a@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
Michael Pendragon wrote:
Let's all talk about Bob
Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and >>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with >>> > music:
So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
And so it goes.
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Patti_Smith
"Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946)[1] is an American >>> > poet, singer-songwriter, and visual artist..."
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
"Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016) >>> > was
a Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and novelist. His work
often
explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal
relationships..."
I'm with Stuart on this one. Folk rock and poetry are entirely
different categories. You and your friends seem to think that
excluding
folkies from the title of "poet" constitutes some sort of negative,
qualitative judgement. It is nothing of the sort. Bob Dylan is a
highly influential folkie. He's not a good poet. He's not a bad
poet.
He's not a poet at all.
Everywhere but you says Dylan is a poet:
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Bob_Dylan
"Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941) is an American poet, singer-songwriter, >>> > musician, and painter..."
Rule of Thumb:
If a song lyric can stand on its own, it's poetry.
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You're an English expert, Michael...
Do you know why the phrase "rule of thumb" is offensive to a great number >>> of
people?
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1998-04-17/news/1998107056_1_rule-of-thumb-phrase-rule-false-etymology
The misunderstood 'rule of thumb'
Misconception: Many feminists for years thought the phrase "rule of thumb" >> referred to British common law's tolerance of wife-beating.
Sun Journal, April 17, 1998|By Stephanie Shapiro | Stephanie Shapiro,SUN
STAFF
Sharon Fenick first heard the figure of speech "rule of thumb" cited as a
sexist pejorative during her freshman year at Harvard seven years ago.
The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse
permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the
professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as the rod >> used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries, the term had
evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
"It sounded very believable to me," says the 24-year-old Fenick, now in her >> third year of law school at the University of Chicago. "I was having my
first contact with feminist thought and [the explanation] was very
impressive to me. It was one of those things I really remember that spread >> around. I can't remember when I found out it wasn't true."
Unlike Fenick, untold historians, feminists and legal experts are unaware
that the folk etymology for "rule of thumb" is false. For them, the notion >> of a "rule of thumb" makes perfect sense, originating as it allegedly does >> from a legal system they see as misogynistic.
In January, wordsmith William Safire debunked "the rule of thumb's" false
etymology in his New York Times Magazine column. The phrase had been called >> to his attention by the president of George Washington University, where a >> female student had denounced its use by an administrator remarking on budget >> problems in the student newspaper.
In gender- and women's-studies courses across the country, the phrase is
still cited as an example of unconscious acceptance and tacit condoning of >> sexist policy. A computer search for the use of "rule of thumb" and "wife" >> in the same newspaper sentence reveals many letters to the editor in recent >> years from women irate about the casual appearance of the figure of speech >> in news articles. In a televised news analysis about domestic violence in
1994, even commentator Cokie Roberts noted the misconception.
The false etymology persists despite the Oxford English Dictionary
definition: "A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or
experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical >> method." The OED dates the phrase's first reference to 1692.
In the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, "rule of thumb" is
additionally defined as a method by which brewers once tested the
temperature of a batch of beer: They dipped a thumb in the brew.
During her first year of law school, Fenick, a wordsmith herself, was
determined to unravel the history of the "rule of thumb." Did the phrase
stem from a specific rule? Was there such a rule? Even if there wasn't a
rule, did an infamous judge's ruling establish "thumbstick" guidelines for >> would-be wife beaters?
She discovered that while "rule of thumb" was not accepted law, there was
evidence aplenty that the British legal system and the American legal system >> it inspired were unkind to women. "I found out that in the 1800s [wife
beating] really was a debatable proposition," she says.
Wife beating is acknowledged in Blackstone's "Commentaries," and many court >> rulings sanctioned the practice. But whether the "rule of thumb" was
accepted as law was a separate matter.
Fenick traced the earliest possible reference to the 17th century, when one >> Dr. Marmaduke Coghill, an Irish judge, held that a man who had beaten his
wife "with such a switch as the one he held in his hand" was within his
matrimonial privilege.
In the 18th century a judge named Francis Buller, dubbed "Judge Thumb" by
the famous caricaturist James Gillray, was said to have allowed that a man >> could beat his wife, as long as the punitive stick was no thicker than his >> thumb. (A witty countess was said to have asked the judge to measure her
husband's thumb exactly, so that she might know the precise extent of his
privilege.)
Fenick also found three 19th-century cases in America that mention the "rule >> of thumb," including an 1868 ruling in North Carolina that "the defendant
had a right to whip his wife with a switch no larger than his thumb."
Buller's "thumbstick" opinion and the three American rulings Fenick found
were intriguing -- and damning -- but did not constitute definitive proof
that the rule of thumb was derived from British common law.
As Fenick, encouraged by a law professor, considered publishing her
findings, she found that Henry Ansgar Kelly, a University of California
English professor, had beaten her to the punch. His "Rule of Thumb and the >> Folklaw of the Husband's Stick" appeared in the September 1994 Journal of
Legal Education.
Kelly, much to Fenick's disappointment, had covered the same territory as
she. (Although she proudly observes that his article overlooked the earliest >> reference to "rule of thumb" by Coghill.) Three and half years later, Safire >> would rely entirely on Kelly's article to make his case in his column.
Fenick's efforts were not in vain, however. In response to a query from a
correspondent to the alt.folkore.urban newsgroup linked to the Urban Legends >> Web site, Fenick posted her article where it is now part of the site's
permanent archives. Since its inception, the site has expanded its mission >> from probing the genesis and spread of urban legends to "confirming or
disproving beliefs and facts of all kinds, including origin of vernacular."
"Rule of thumb" and other figures of speech can work much the same way that >> urban legends do: They may appear mysteriously, spread spontaneously and
contain elements of humor or horror. And, like urban legends, a figure of
speech may contain a grain of emotional, if not actual, truth.
Thus it was easy at first for Fenick and others to believe that the "rule of >> thumb" was founded in common law. Patricia A. Turner, a University of
California at Davis folklorist, well understands how a falsehood can acquire >> the mantle of truth.
In "I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture,"
Turner examines the way allegations of forced birth control, corporate
collusion with the Ku Klux Klan, drug distribution targeted at urban areas >> and other anti-black conspiracy theories circulating in the African-American >> community are based on racist realities and serve as a form of resistance
against white oppression.
The same theory can be applied to the rule of thumb, Turner says. A text may >> be proved to be inaccurate or false, but "if it reflects some deeper truth >> in society, it doesn't go away." The term "rule of thumb" may "not have that >> specific etymological origin, but men have dominated women in workplaces and >> in homes and in virtually every setting. It speaks to a deeper truth."
Students of women's history who want to research possibly apocryphal ideas >> are also at a disadvantage because they "don't have the paper trail that
more mainstream areas of academic discipline have," Turner says. "Sometimes >> it's more difficult to get to the bottom of something."
That said, Turner acknowledges that it is "very sloppy for an academic to
pass on misinformation." Once a theory such as the inaccurate history of the >> "rule of thumb" has been debunked, it can backfire on those promoting it,
she says. "If someone has read it who knows it is false, everything gets
discredited on that level. So based on one falsehood, a whole history can be >> challenged."
That is what concerned scholars and social critics say happened when
Christina Hoff Sommers debunked the "rule of thumb" in her 1994 book, "Who >> Stole Feminism? How Women have Betrayed Women." Sommers finds the earliest >> misuse of the phrase in a 1976 National Organization for Women report and
uses it to bolster her case against domestic-violence statistics.
The feminist rush to brandish the "rule of thumb" as justification for their >> crusade, Turner suggests, may inadvertently have provided Sommers and her
sympathizers with the ideal ammunition to discredit the same cause.
As for Fenick, she received a nice letter from Kelly, who learned RTC of her >> research after the Safire piece ran. She has written him back, and hopes to >> hear soon what he thinks about her Coghill reference.
Pub Date: 4/17/98
W.Dockery wrote:
General-Zod wrote:
Will Dockery wrote:
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
Like I've said before, if it is sickly sweet and sappy... it is probably a Pat Boone song.
HTH and HAND.
🙂
I am not too big of a fan of Pat Boone...!
My drawing of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg...
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10159616377009363&set=g.629438503762910
I do kind of love Pat Boone's cover of John Stewart:
https://youtu.be/XSpj3l-_MQY
Yes that is classic....
Will Dockery wrote:
"Earl Browder" wrote in message
news:4c381c37-c066-4a68-be08-34f3c04ecc3a@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
Michael Pendragon wrote:
Let's all talk about Bob
Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and >>>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with >>>> > music:
So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
And so it goes.
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Patti_Smith
"Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946)[1] is an American >>>> > poet, singer-songwriter, and visual artist..."
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
"Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016) >>>> > was
a Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and novelist. His work >>>> > often
explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal
relationships..."
I'm with Stuart on this one. Folk rock and poetry are entirely
different categories. You and your friends seem to think that
excluding
folkies from the title of "poet" constitutes some sort of negative, >>>> > > qualitative judgement. It is nothing of the sort. Bob Dylan is a >>>> > > highly influential folkie. He's not a good poet. He's not a bad
poet.
He's not a poet at all.
Everywhere but you says Dylan is a poet:
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Bob_Dylan
"Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941) is an American poet, singer-songwriter, >>>> > musician, and painter..."
Rule of Thumb:
If a song lyric can stand on its own, it's poetry.
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You're an English expert, Michael...
Do you know why the phrase "rule of thumb" is offensive to a great number >>>> of
people?
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1998-04-17/news/1998107056_1_rule-of-thumb-phrase-rule-false-etymology
The misunderstood 'rule of thumb'
Misconception: Many feminists for years thought the phrase "rule of thumb" >>> referred to British common law's tolerance of wife-beating.
Sun Journal, April 17, 1998|By Stephanie Shapiro | Stephanie Shapiro,SUN >>> STAFF
Sharon Fenick first heard the figure of speech "rule of thumb" cited as a >>> sexist pejorative during her freshman year at Harvard seven years ago.
The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse
permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the
professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as the rod >>> used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries, the term had >>> evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
"It sounded very believable to me," says the 24-year-old Fenick, now in her >>> third year of law school at the University of Chicago. "I was having my
first contact with feminist thought and [the explanation] was very
impressive to me. It was one of those things I really remember that spread >>> around. I can't remember when I found out it wasn't true."
Unlike Fenick, untold historians, feminists and legal experts are unaware >>> that the folk etymology for "rule of thumb" is false. For them, the notion >>> of a "rule of thumb" makes perfect sense, originating as it allegedly does >>> from a legal system they see as misogynistic.
In January, wordsmith William Safire debunked "the rule of thumb's" false >>> etymology in his New York Times Magazine column. The phrase had been called >>> to his attention by the president of George Washington University, where a >>> female student had denounced its use by an administrator remarking on budget
problems in the student newspaper.
In gender- and women's-studies courses across the country, the phrase is >>> still cited as an example of unconscious acceptance and tacit condoning of >>> sexist policy. A computer search for the use of "rule of thumb" and "wife" >>> in the same newspaper sentence reveals many letters to the editor in recent >>> years from women irate about the casual appearance of the figure of speech >>> in news articles. In a televised news analysis about domestic violence in >>> 1994, even commentator Cokie Roberts noted the misconception.
The false etymology persists despite the Oxford English Dictionary
definition: "A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or
experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical >>> method." The OED dates the phrase's first reference to 1692.
In the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, "rule of thumb" is
additionally defined as a method by which brewers once tested the
temperature of a batch of beer: They dipped a thumb in the brew.
During her first year of law school, Fenick, a wordsmith herself, was
determined to unravel the history of the "rule of thumb." Did the phrase >>> stem from a specific rule? Was there such a rule? Even if there wasn't a >>> rule, did an infamous judge's ruling establish "thumbstick" guidelines for >>> would-be wife beaters?
She discovered that while "rule of thumb" was not accepted law, there was >>> evidence aplenty that the British legal system and the American legal system
it inspired were unkind to women. "I found out that in the 1800s [wife
beating] really was a debatable proposition," she says.
Wife beating is acknowledged in Blackstone's "Commentaries," and many court >>> rulings sanctioned the practice. But whether the "rule of thumb" was
accepted as law was a separate matter.
Fenick traced the earliest possible reference to the 17th century, when one >>> Dr. Marmaduke Coghill, an Irish judge, held that a man who had beaten his >>> wife "with such a switch as the one he held in his hand" was within his
matrimonial privilege.
In the 18th century a judge named Francis Buller, dubbed "Judge Thumb" by >>> the famous caricaturist James Gillray, was said to have allowed that a man >>> could beat his wife, as long as the punitive stick was no thicker than his >>> thumb. (A witty countess was said to have asked the judge to measure her >>> husband's thumb exactly, so that she might know the precise extent of his >>> privilege.)
Fenick also found three 19th-century cases in America that mention the "rule
of thumb," including an 1868 ruling in North Carolina that "the defendant >>> had a right to whip his wife with a switch no larger than his thumb."
Buller's "thumbstick" opinion and the three American rulings Fenick found >>> were intriguing -- and damning -- but did not constitute definitive proof >>> that the rule of thumb was derived from British common law.
As Fenick, encouraged by a law professor, considered publishing her
findings, she found that Henry Ansgar Kelly, a University of California
English professor, had beaten her to the punch. His "Rule of Thumb and the >>> Folklaw of the Husband's Stick" appeared in the September 1994 Journal of >>> Legal Education.
Kelly, much to Fenick's disappointment, had covered the same territory as >>> she. (Although she proudly observes that his article overlooked the earliest
reference to "rule of thumb" by Coghill.) Three and half years later, Safire
would rely entirely on Kelly's article to make his case in his column.
Fenick's efforts were not in vain, however. In response to a query from a >>> correspondent to the alt.folkore.urban newsgroup linked to the Urban Legends
Web site, Fenick posted her article where it is now part of the site's
permanent archives. Since its inception, the site has expanded its mission >>> from probing the genesis and spread of urban legends to "confirming or
disproving beliefs and facts of all kinds, including origin of vernacular."
"Rule of thumb" and other figures of speech can work much the same way that >>> urban legends do: They may appear mysteriously, spread spontaneously and >>> contain elements of humor or horror. And, like urban legends, a figure of >>> speech may contain a grain of emotional, if not actual, truth.
Thus it was easy at first for Fenick and others to believe that the "rule of
thumb" was founded in common law. Patricia A. Turner, a University of
California at Davis folklorist, well understands how a falsehood can acquire
the mantle of truth.
In "I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture," >>> Turner examines the way allegations of forced birth control, corporate
collusion with the Ku Klux Klan, drug distribution targeted at urban areas >>> and other anti-black conspiracy theories circulating in the African-American
community are based on racist realities and serve as a form of resistance >>> against white oppression.
The same theory can be applied to the rule of thumb, Turner says. A text may
be proved to be inaccurate or false, but "if it reflects some deeper truth >>> in society, it doesn't go away." The term "rule of thumb" may "not have that
specific etymological origin, but men have dominated women in workplaces and
in homes and in virtually every setting. It speaks to a deeper truth."
Students of women's history who want to research possibly apocryphal ideas >>> are also at a disadvantage because they "don't have the paper trail that >>> more mainstream areas of academic discipline have," Turner says. "Sometimes >>> it's more difficult to get to the bottom of something."
That said, Turner acknowledges that it is "very sloppy for an academic to >>> pass on misinformation." Once a theory such as the inaccurate history of the
"rule of thumb" has been debunked, it can backfire on those promoting it, >>> she says. "If someone has read it who knows it is false, everything gets >>> discredited on that level. So based on one falsehood, a whole history can be
challenged."
That is what concerned scholars and social critics say happened when
Christina Hoff Sommers debunked the "rule of thumb" in her 1994 book, "Who >>> Stole Feminism? How Women have Betrayed Women." Sommers finds the earliest >>> misuse of the phrase in a 1976 National Organization for Women report and >>> uses it to bolster her case against domestic-violence statistics.
The feminist rush to brandish the "rule of thumb" as justification for their
crusade, Turner suggests, may inadvertently have provided Sommers and her >>> sympathizers with the ideal ammunition to discredit the same cause.
As for Fenick, she received a nice letter from Kelly, who learned RTC of her
research after the Safire piece ran. She has written him back, and hopes to >>> hear soon what he thinks about her Coghill reference.
Pub Date: 4/17/98
Quite an interesting think piece....
"Earl Browder" wrote in message
news:4c381c37-c066-4a68-be08-34f3c04ecc3a@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
Michael Pendragon wrote:
Let's all talk about Bob
Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and >>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with >>> > music:
So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
And so it goes.
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Patti_Smith
"Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946)[1] is an American >>> > poet, singer-songwriter, and visual artist..."
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
"Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016) >>> > was
a Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and novelist. His work
often
explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal
relationships..."
I'm with Stuart on this one. Folk rock and poetry are entirely
different categories. You and your friends seem to think that
excluding
folkies from the title of "poet" constitutes some sort of negative,
qualitative judgement. It is nothing of the sort. Bob Dylan is a
highly influential folkie. He's not a good poet. He's not a bad
poet.
He's not a poet at all.
Everywhere but you says Dylan is a poet:
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Bob_Dylan
"Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941) is an American poet, singer-songwriter, >>> > musician, and painter..."
Rule of Thumb:
If a song lyric can stand on its own, it's poetry.
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You're an English expert, Michael...
Do you know why the phrase "rule of thumb" is offensive to a great number >>> of
people?
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1998-04-17/news/1998107056_1_rule-of-thumb-phrase-rule-false-etymology
The misunderstood 'rule of thumb'
Misconception: Many feminists for years thought the phrase "rule of thumb" >> referred to British common law's tolerance of wife-beating.
Sun Journal, April 17, 1998|By Stephanie Shapiro | Stephanie Shapiro,SUN
STAFF
Sharon Fenick first heard the figure of speech "rule of thumb" cited as a
sexist pejorative during her freshman year at Harvard seven years ago.
The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse
permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the
professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as the rod >> used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries, the term had
evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
"It sounded very believable to me," says the 24-year-old Fenick, now in her >> third year of law school at the University of Chicago. "I was having my
first contact with feminist thought and [the explanation] was very
impressive to me. It was one of those things I really remember that spread >> around. I can't remember when I found out it wasn't true."
Unlike Fenick, untold historians, feminists and legal experts are unaware
that the folk etymology for "rule of thumb" is false. For them, the notion >> of a "rule of thumb" makes perfect sense, originating as it allegedly does >> from a legal system they see as misogynistic.
In January, wordsmith William Safire debunked "the rule of thumb's" false
etymology in his New York Times Magazine column. The phrase had been called >> to his attention by the president of George Washington University, where a >> female student had denounced its use by an administrator remarking on budget >> problems in the student newspaper.
In gender- and women's-studies courses across the country, the phrase is
still cited as an example of unconscious acceptance and tacit condoning of >> sexist policy. A computer search for the use of "rule of thumb" and "wife" >> in the same newspaper sentence reveals many letters to the editor in recent >> years from women irate about the casual appearance of the figure of speech >> in news articles. In a televised news analysis about domestic violence in
1994, even commentator Cokie Roberts noted the misconception.
The false etymology persists despite the Oxford English Dictionary
definition: "A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or
experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical >> method." The OED dates the phrase's first reference to 1692.
In the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, "rule of thumb" is
additionally defined as a method by which brewers once tested the
temperature of a batch of beer: They dipped a thumb in the brew.
During her first year of law school, Fenick, a wordsmith herself, was
determined to unravel the history of the "rule of thumb." Did the phrase
stem from a specific rule? Was there such a rule? Even if there wasn't a
rule, did an infamous judge's ruling establish "thumbstick" guidelines for >> would-be wife beaters?
She discovered that while "rule of thumb" was not accepted law, there was
evidence aplenty that the British legal system and the American legal system >> it inspired were unkind to women. "I found out that in the 1800s [wife
beating] really was a debatable proposition," she says.
Wife beating is acknowledged in Blackstone's "Commentaries," and many court >> rulings sanctioned the practice. But whether the "rule of thumb" was
accepted as law was a separate matter.
Fenick traced the earliest possible reference to the 17th century, when one >> Dr. Marmaduke Coghill, an Irish judge, held that a man who had beaten his
wife "with such a switch as the one he held in his hand" was within his
matrimonial privilege.
In the 18th century a judge named Francis Buller, dubbed "Judge Thumb" by
the famous caricaturist James Gillray, was said to have allowed that a man >> could beat his wife, as long as the punitive stick was no thicker than his >> thumb. (A witty countess was said to have asked the judge to measure her
husband's thumb exactly, so that she might know the precise extent of his
privilege.)
Fenick also found three 19th-century cases in America that mention the "rule >> of thumb," including an 1868 ruling in North Carolina that "the defendant
had a right to whip his wife with a switch no larger than his thumb."
Buller's "thumbstick" opinion and the three American rulings Fenick found
were intriguing -- and damning -- but did not constitute definitive proof
that the rule of thumb was derived from British common law.
As Fenick, encouraged by a law professor, considered publishing her
findings, she found that Henry Ansgar Kelly, a University of California
English professor, had beaten her to the punch. His "Rule of Thumb and the >> Folklaw of the Husband's Stick" appeared in the September 1994 Journal of
Legal Education.
Kelly, much to Fenick's disappointment, had covered the same territory as
she. (Although she proudly observes that his article overlooked the earliest >> reference to "rule of thumb" by Coghill.) Three and half years later, Safire >> would rely entirely on Kelly's article to make his case in his column.
Fenick's efforts were not in vain, however. In response to a query from a
correspondent to the alt.folkore.urban newsgroup linked to the Urban Legends >> Web site, Fenick posted her article where it is now part of the site's
permanent archives. Since its inception, the site has expanded its mission >> from probing the genesis and spread of urban legends to "confirming or
disproving beliefs and facts of all kinds, including origin of vernacular."
"Rule of thumb" and other figures of speech can work much the same way that >> urban legends do: They may appear mysteriously, spread spontaneously and
contain elements of humor or horror. And, like urban legends, a figure of
speech may contain a grain of emotional, if not actual, truth.
Thus it was easy at first for Fenick and others to believe that the "rule of >> thumb" was founded in common law. Patricia A. Turner, a University of
California at Davis folklorist, well understands how a falsehood can acquire >> the mantle of truth.
In "I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture,"
Turner examines the way allegations of forced birth control, corporate
collusion with the Ku Klux Klan, drug distribution targeted at urban areas >> and other anti-black conspiracy theories circulating in the African-American >> community are based on racist realities and serve as a form of resistance
against white oppression.
The same theory can be applied to the rule of thumb, Turner says. A text may >> be proved to be inaccurate or false, but "if it reflects some deeper truth >> in society, it doesn't go away." The term "rule of thumb" may "not have that >> specific etymological origin, but men have dominated women in workplaces and >> in homes and in virtually every setting. It speaks to a deeper truth."
Students of women's history who want to research possibly apocryphal ideas >> are also at a disadvantage because they "don't have the paper trail that
more mainstream areas of academic discipline have," Turner says. "Sometimes >> it's more difficult to get to the bottom of something."
That said, Turner acknowledges that it is "very sloppy for an academic to
pass on misinformation." Once a theory such as the inaccurate history of the >> "rule of thumb" has been debunked, it can backfire on those promoting it,
she says. "If someone has read it who knows it is false, everything gets
discredited on that level. So based on one falsehood, a whole history can be >> challenged."
That is what concerned scholars and social critics say happened when
Christina Hoff Sommers debunked the "rule of thumb" in her 1994 book, "Who >> Stole Feminism? How Women have Betrayed Women." Sommers finds the earliest >> misuse of the phrase in a 1976 National Organization for Women report and
uses it to bolster her case against domestic-violence statistics.
The feminist rush to brandish the "rule of thumb" as justification for their >> crusade, Turner suggests, may inadvertently have provided Sommers and her
sympathizers with the ideal ammunition to discredit the same cause.
As for Fenick, she received a nice letter from Kelly, who learned RTC of her >> research after the Safire piece ran. She has written him back, and hopes to >> hear soon what he thinks about her Coghill reference.
Pub Date: 4/17/98
----------------------------------------------------
Found in my drafts file, worth archiving.
Will Dockery wrote:
"Earl Browder" wrote in message
news:4c381c37-c066-4a68-be08-34f3c04ecc3a@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
Michael Pendragon wrote:
Let's all talk about Bob
Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and >>>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with >>>> > music:
So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
I still haven't looked up Pat Boone's 1975 hit record...
And so it goes.
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Patti_Smith
"Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946)[1] is an American >>>> > poet, singer-songwriter, and visual artist..."
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
"Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016) >>>> > was
a Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and novelist. His work >>>> > often
explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal
relationships..."
I'm with Stuart on this one. Folk rock and poetry are entirely
different categories. You and your friends seem to think that
excluding
folkies from the title of "poet" constitutes some sort of negative, >>>> > > qualitative judgement. It is nothing of the sort. Bob Dylan is a >>>> > > highly influential folkie. He's not a good poet. He's not a bad
poet.
He's not a poet at all.
Everywhere but you says Dylan is a poet:
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Bob_Dylan
"Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941) is an American poet, singer-songwriter, >>>> > musician, and painter..."
Rule of Thumb:
If a song lyric can stand on its own, it's poetry.
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You're an English expert, Michael...
Do you know why the phrase "rule of thumb" is offensive to a great number >>>> of
people?
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1998-04-17/news/1998107056_1_rule-of-thumb-phrase-rule-false-etymology
The misunderstood 'rule of thumb'
Misconception: Many feminists for years thought the phrase "rule of thumb" >>> referred to British common law's tolerance of wife-beating.
Sun Journal, April 17, 1998|By Stephanie Shapiro | Stephanie Shapiro,SUN >>> STAFF
Sharon Fenick first heard the figure of speech "rule of thumb" cited as a >>> sexist pejorative during her freshman year at Harvard seven years ago.
The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse
permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the
professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as the rod >>> used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries, the term had >>> evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
"It sounded very believable to me," says the 24-year-old Fenick, now in her >>> third year of law school at the University of Chicago. "I was having my
first contact with feminist thought and [the explanation] was very
impressive to me. It was one of those things I really remember that spread >>> around. I can't remember when I found out it wasn't true."
Unlike Fenick, untold historians, feminists and legal experts are unaware >>> that the folk etymology for "rule of thumb" is false. For them, the notion >>> of a "rule of thumb" makes perfect sense, originating as it allegedly does >>> from a legal system they see as misogynistic.
In January, wordsmith William Safire debunked "the rule of thumb's" false >>> etymology in his New York Times Magazine column. The phrase had been called >>> to his attention by the president of George Washington University, where a >>> female student had denounced its use by an administrator remarking on budget
problems in the student newspaper.
In gender- and women's-studies courses across the country, the phrase is >>> still cited as an example of unconscious acceptance and tacit condoning of >>> sexist policy. A computer search for the use of "rule of thumb" and "wife" >>> in the same newspaper sentence reveals many letters to the editor in recent >>> years from women irate about the casual appearance of the figure of speech >>> in news articles. In a televised news analysis about domestic violence in >>> 1994, even commentator Cokie Roberts noted the misconception.
The false etymology persists despite the Oxford English Dictionary
definition: "A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or
experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical >>> method." The OED dates the phrase's first reference to 1692.
In the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, "rule of thumb" is
additionally defined as a method by which brewers once tested the
temperature of a batch of beer: They dipped a thumb in the brew.
During her first year of law school, Fenick, a wordsmith herself, was
determined to unravel the history of the "rule of thumb." Did the phrase >>> stem from a specific rule? Was there such a rule? Even if there wasn't a >>> rule, did an infamous judge's ruling establish "thumbstick" guidelines for >>> would-be wife beaters?
She discovered that while "rule of thumb" was not accepted law, there was >>> evidence aplenty that the British legal system and the American legal system
it inspired were unkind to women. "I found out that in the 1800s [wife
beating] really was a debatable proposition," she says.
Wife beating is acknowledged in Blackstone's "Commentaries," and many court >>> rulings sanctioned the practice. But whether the "rule of thumb" was
accepted as law was a separate matter.
Fenick traced the earliest possible reference to the 17th century, when one >>> Dr. Marmaduke Coghill, an Irish judge, held that a man who had beaten his >>> wife "with such a switch as the one he held in his hand" was within his
matrimonial privilege.
In the 18th century a judge named Francis Buller, dubbed "Judge Thumb" by >>> the famous caricaturist James Gillray, was said to have allowed that a man >>> could beat his wife, as long as the punitive stick was no thicker than his >>> thumb. (A witty countess was said to have asked the judge to measure her >>> husband's thumb exactly, so that she might know the precise extent of his >>> privilege.)
Fenick also found three 19th-century cases in America that mention the "rule
of thumb," including an 1868 ruling in North Carolina that "the defendant >>> had a right to whip his wife with a switch no larger than his thumb."
Buller's "thumbstick" opinion and the three American rulings Fenick found >>> were intriguing -- and damning -- but did not constitute definitive proof >>> that the rule of thumb was derived from British common law.
As Fenick, encouraged by a law professor, considered publishing her
findings, she found that Henry Ansgar Kelly, a University of California
English professor, had beaten her to the punch. His "Rule of Thumb and the >>> Folklaw of the Husband's Stick" appeared in the September 1994 Journal of >>> Legal Education.
Kelly, much to Fenick's disappointment, had covered the same territory as >>> she. (Although she proudly observes that his article overlooked the earliest
reference to "rule of thumb" by Coghill.) Three and half years later, Safire
would rely entirely on Kelly's article to make his case in his column.
Fenick's efforts were not in vain, however. In response to a query from a >>> correspondent to the alt.folkore.urban newsgroup linked to the Urban Legends
Web site, Fenick posted her article where it is now part of the site's
permanent archives. Since its inception, the site has expanded its mission >>> from probing the genesis and spread of urban legends to "confirming or
disproving beliefs and facts of all kinds, including origin of vernacular."
"Rule of thumb" and other figures of speech can work much the same way that >>> urban legends do: They may appear mysteriously, spread spontaneously and >>> contain elements of humor or horror. And, like urban legends, a figure of >>> speech may contain a grain of emotional, if not actual, truth.
Thus it was easy at first for Fenick and others to believe that the "rule of
thumb" was founded in common law. Patricia A. Turner, a University of
California at Davis folklorist, well understands how a falsehood can acquire
the mantle of truth.
In "I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture," >>> Turner examines the way allegations of forced birth control, corporate
collusion with the Ku Klux Klan, drug distribution targeted at urban areas >>> and other anti-black conspiracy theories circulating in the African-American
community are based on racist realities and serve as a form of resistance >>> against white oppression.
The same theory can be applied to the rule of thumb, Turner says. A text may
be proved to be inaccurate or false, but "if it reflects some deeper truth >>> in society, it doesn't go away." The term "rule of thumb" may "not have that
specific etymological origin, but men have dominated women in workplaces and
in homes and in virtually every setting. It speaks to a deeper truth."
Students of women's history who want to research possibly apocryphal ideas >>> are also at a disadvantage because they "don't have the paper trail that >>> more mainstream areas of academic discipline have," Turner says. "Sometimes >>> it's more difficult to get to the bottom of something."
That said, Turner acknowledges that it is "very sloppy for an academic to >>> pass on misinformation." Once a theory such as the inaccurate history of the
"rule of thumb" has been debunked, it can backfire on those promoting it, >>> she says. "If someone has read it who knows it is false, everything gets >>> discredited on that level. So based on one falsehood, a whole history can be
challenged."
That is what concerned scholars and social critics say happened when
Christina Hoff Sommers debunked the "rule of thumb" in her 1994 book, "Who >>> Stole Feminism? How Women have Betrayed Women." Sommers finds the earliest >>> misuse of the phrase in a 1976 National Organization for Women report and >>> uses it to bolster her case against domestic-violence statistics.
The feminist rush to brandish the "rule of thumb" as justification for their
crusade, Turner suggests, may inadvertently have provided Sommers and her >>> sympathizers with the ideal ammunition to discredit the same cause.
As for Fenick, she received a nice letter from Kelly, who learned RTC of her
research after the Safire piece ran. She has written him back, and hopes to >>> hear soon what he thinks about her Coghill reference.
Pub Date: 4/17/98
----------------------------------------------------
Found in my drafts file, worth archiving.
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
Michael Pendragon wrote:
Let's all talk about Bob
Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and >>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with >>> > music:
So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
And so it goes.
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Patti_Smith
"Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946)[1] is an American >>> > poet, singer-songwriter, and visual artist..."
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
"Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016) >>> > was
a Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and novelist. His work
often
explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal
relationships..."
I'm with Stuart on this one. Folk rock and poetry are entirely
different categories. You and your friends seem to think that
excluding
folkies from the title of "poet" constitutes some sort of negative,
qualitative judgement. It is nothing of the sort. Bob Dylan is a
highly influential folkie. He's not a good poet. He's not a bad
poet.
He's not a poet at all.
Everywhere but you says Dylan is a poet:
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Bob_Dylan
"Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941) is an American poet, singer-songwriter, >>> > musician, and painter..."
Rule of Thumb:
If a song lyric can stand on its own, it's poetry.
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You're an English expert, Michael...
Do you know why the phrase "rule of thumb" is offensive to a great number >>> of
people?
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1998-04-17/news/1998107056_1_rule-of-thumb-phrase-rule-false-etymology
The misunderstood 'rule of thumb'
Misconception: Many feminists for years thought the phrase "rule of thumb" >> referred to British common law's tolerance of wife-beating.
Sun Journal, April 17, 1998|By Stephanie Shapiro | Stephanie Shapiro,SUN
STAFF
Sharon Fenick first heard the figure of speech "rule of thumb" cited as a
sexist pejorative during her freshman year at Harvard seven years ago.
The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse
permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the
professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as the rod >> used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries, the term had
evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
"It sounded very believable to me," says the 24-year-old Fenick, now in her >> third year of law school at the University of Chicago. "I was having my
first contact with feminist thought and [the explanation] was very
impressive to me. It was one of those things I really remember that spread >> around. I can't remember when I found out it wasn't true."
Unlike Fenick, untold historians, feminists and legal experts are unaware
that the folk etymology for "rule of thumb" is false. For them, the notion >> of a "rule of thumb" makes perfect sense, originating as it allegedly does >> from a legal system they see as misogynistic.
In January, wordsmith William Safire debunked "the rule of thumb's" false
etymology in his New York Times Magazine column. The phrase had been called >> to his attention by the president of George Washington University, where a >> female student had denounced its use by an administrator remarking on budget >> problems in the student newspaper.
In gender- and women's-studies courses across the country, the phrase is
still cited as an example of unconscious acceptance and tacit condoning of >> sexist policy. A computer search for the use of "rule of thumb" and "wife" >> in the same newspaper sentence reveals many letters to the editor in recent >> years from women irate about the casual appearance of the figure of speech >> in news articles. In a televised news analysis about domestic violence in
1994, even commentator Cokie Roberts noted the misconception.
The false etymology persists despite the Oxford English Dictionary
definition: "A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or
experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical >> method." The OED dates the phrase's first reference to 1692.
In the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, "rule of thumb" is
additionally defined as a method by which brewers once tested the
temperature of a batch of beer: They dipped a thumb in the brew.
During her first year of law school, Fenick, a wordsmith herself, was
determined to unravel the history of the "rule of thumb." Did the phrase
stem from a specific rule? Was there such a rule? Even if there wasn't a
rule, did an infamous judge's ruling establish "thumbstick" guidelines for >> would-be wife beaters?
She discovered that while "rule of thumb" was not accepted law, there was
evidence aplenty that the British legal system and the American legal system >> it inspired were unkind to women. "I found out that in the 1800s [wife
beating] really was a debatable proposition," she says.
Wife beating is acknowledged in Blackstone's "Commentaries," and many court >> rulings sanctioned the practice. But whether the "rule of thumb" was
accepted as law was a separate matter.
Fenick traced the earliest possible reference to the 17th century, when one >> Dr. Marmaduke Coghill, an Irish judge, held that a man who had beaten his
wife "with such a switch as the one he held in his hand" was within his
matrimonial privilege.
In the 18th century a judge named Francis Buller, dubbed "Judge Thumb" by
the famous caricaturist James Gillray, was said to have allowed that a man >> could beat his wife, as long as the punitive stick was no thicker than his >> thumb. (A witty countess was said to have asked the judge to measure her
husband's thumb exactly, so that she might know the precise extent of his
privilege.)
Fenick also found three 19th-century cases in America that mention the "rule >> of thumb," including an 1868 ruling in North Carolina that "the defendant
had a right to whip his wife with a switch no larger than his thumb."
Buller's "thumbstick" opinion and the three American rulings Fenick found
were intriguing -- and damning -- but did not constitute definitive proof
that the rule of thumb was derived from British common law.
As Fenick, encouraged by a law professor, considered publishing her
findings, she found that Henry Ansgar Kelly, a University of California
English professor, had beaten her to the punch. His "Rule of Thumb and the >> Folklaw of the Husband's Stick" appeared in the September 1994 Journal of
Legal Education.
Kelly, much to Fenick's disappointment, had covered the same territory as
she. (Although she proudly observes that his article overlooked the earliest >> reference to "rule of thumb" by Coghill.) Three and half years later, Safire >> would rely entirely on Kelly's article to make his case in his column.
Fenick's efforts were not in vain, however. In response to a query from a
correspondent to the alt.folkore.urban newsgroup linked to the Urban Legends >> Web site, Fenick posted her article where it is now part of the site's
permanent archives. Since its inception, the site has expanded its mission >> from probing the genesis and spread of urban legends to "confirming or
disproving beliefs and facts of all kinds, including origin of vernacular."
"Rule of thumb" and other figures of speech can work much the same way that >> urban legends do: They may appear mysteriously, spread spontaneously and
contain elements of humor or horror. And, like urban legends, a figure of
speech may contain a grain of emotional, if not actual, truth.
Thus it was easy at first for Fenick and others to believe that the "rule of >> thumb" was founded in common law. Patricia A. Turner, a University of
California at Davis folklorist, well understands how a falsehood can acquire >> the mantle of truth.
In "I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture,"
Turner examines the way allegations of forced birth control, corporate
collusion with the Ku Klux Klan, drug distribution targeted at urban areas >> and other anti-black conspiracy theories circulating in the African-American >> community are based on racist realities and serve as a form of resistance
against white oppression.
The same theory can be applied to the rule of thumb, Turner says. A text may >> be proved to be inaccurate or false, but "if it reflects some deeper truth >> in society, it doesn't go away." The term "rule of thumb" may "not have that >> specific etymological origin, but men have dominated women in workplaces and >> in homes and in virtually every setting. It speaks to a deeper truth."
Students of women's history who want to research possibly apocryphal ideas >> are also at a disadvantage because they "don't have the paper trail that
more mainstream areas of academic discipline have," Turner says. "Sometimes >> it's more difficult to get to the bottom of something."
That said, Turner acknowledges that it is "very sloppy for an academic to
pass on misinformation." Once a theory such as the inaccurate history of the >> "rule of thumb" has been debunked, it can backfire on those promoting it,
she says. "If someone has read it who knows it is false, everything gets
discredited on that level. So based on one falsehood, a whole history can be >> challenged."
That is what concerned scholars and social critics say happened when
Christina Hoff Sommers debunked the "rule of thumb" in her 1994 book, "Who >> Stole Feminism? How Women have Betrayed Women." Sommers finds the earliest >> misuse of the phrase in a 1976 National Organization for Women report and
uses it to bolster her case against domestic-violence statistics.
The feminist rush to brandish the "rule of thumb" as justification for their >> crusade, Turner suggests, may inadvertently have provided Sommers and her
sympathizers with the ideal ammunition to discredit the same cause.
As for Fenick, she received a nice letter from Kelly, who learned RTC of her >> research after the Safire piece ran. She has written him back, and hopes to >> hear soon what he thinks about her Coghill reference.
Pub Date: 4/17/98
----------------------------------------------------
Found in my drafts file, worth archiving.
Will Dockery wrote:
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
Michael Pendragon wrote:
Let's all talk about Bob
Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and >>>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with >>>> > music:
So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
And so it goes.
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Patti_Smith
"Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946)[1] is an American >>>> > poet, singer-songwriter, and visual artist..."
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
"Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016) >>>> > was
a Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and novelist. His work >>>> > often
explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal
relationships..."
I'm with Stuart on this one. Folk rock and poetry are entirely
different categories. You and your friends seem to think that
excluding
folkies from the title of "poet" constitutes some sort of negative, >>>> > > qualitative judgement. It is nothing of the sort. Bob Dylan is a >>>> > > highly influential folkie. He's not a good poet. He's not a bad
poet.
He's not a poet at all.
Everywhere but you says Dylan is a poet:
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Bob_Dylan
"Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941) is an American poet, singer-songwriter, >>>> > musician, and painter..."
Rule of Thumb:
If a song lyric can stand on its own, it's poetry.
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You're an English expert, Michael...
Do you know why the phrase "rule of thumb" is offensive to a great number >>>> of
people?
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1998-04-17/news/1998107056_1_rule-of-thumb-phrase-rule-false-etymology
The misunderstood 'rule of thumb'
Misconception: Many feminists for years thought the phrase "rule of thumb" >>> referred to British common law's tolerance of wife-beating.
Sun Journal, April 17, 1998|By Stephanie Shapiro | Stephanie Shapiro,SUN >>> STAFF
Sharon Fenick first heard the figure of speech "rule of thumb" cited as a >>> sexist pejorative during her freshman year at Harvard seven years ago.
The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse
permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the
professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as the rod >>> used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries, the term had >>> evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
"It sounded very believable to me," says the 24-year-old Fenick, now in her >>> third year of law school at the University of Chicago. "I was having my
first contact with feminist thought and [the explanation] was very
impressive to me. It was one of those things I really remember that spread >>> around. I can't remember when I found out it wasn't true."
Unlike Fenick, untold historians, feminists and legal experts are unaware >>> that the folk etymology for "rule of thumb" is false. For them, the notion >>> of a "rule of thumb" makes perfect sense, originating as it allegedly does >>> from a legal system they see as misogynistic.
In January, wordsmith William Safire debunked "the rule of thumb's" false >>> etymology in his New York Times Magazine column. The phrase had been called >>> to his attention by the president of George Washington University, where a >>> female student had denounced its use by an administrator remarking on budget
problems in the student newspaper.
In gender- and women's-studies courses across the country, the phrase is >>> still cited as an example of unconscious acceptance and tacit condoning of >>> sexist policy. A computer search for the use of "rule of thumb" and "wife" >>> in the same newspaper sentence reveals many letters to the editor in recent >>> years from women irate about the casual appearance of the figure of speech >>> in news articles. In a televised news analysis about domestic violence in >>> 1994, even commentator Cokie Roberts noted the misconception.
The false etymology persists despite the Oxford English Dictionary
definition: "A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or
experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical >>> method." The OED dates the phrase's first reference to 1692.
In the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, "rule of thumb" is
additionally defined as a method by which brewers once tested the
temperature of a batch of beer: They dipped a thumb in the brew.
During her first year of law school, Fenick, a wordsmith herself, was
determined to unravel the history of the "rule of thumb." Did the phrase >>> stem from a specific rule? Was there such a rule? Even if there wasn't a >>> rule, did an infamous judge's ruling establish "thumbstick" guidelines for >>> would-be wife beaters?
She discovered that while "rule of thumb" was not accepted law, there was >>> evidence aplenty that the British legal system and the American legal system
it inspired were unkind to women. "I found out that in the 1800s [wife
beating] really was a debatable proposition," she says.
Wife beating is acknowledged in Blackstone's "Commentaries," and many court >>> rulings sanctioned the practice. But whether the "rule of thumb" was
accepted as law was a separate matter.
Fenick traced the earliest possible reference to the 17th century, when one >>> Dr. Marmaduke Coghill, an Irish judge, held that a man who had beaten his >>> wife "with such a switch as the one he held in his hand" was within his
matrimonial privilege.
In the 18th century a judge named Francis Buller, dubbed "Judge Thumb" by >>> the famous caricaturist James Gillray, was said to have allowed that a man >>> could beat his wife, as long as the punitive stick was no thicker than his >>> thumb. (A witty countess was said to have asked the judge to measure her >>> husband's thumb exactly, so that she might know the precise extent of his >>> privilege.)
Fenick also found three 19th-century cases in America that mention the "rule
of thumb," including an 1868 ruling in North Carolina that "the defendant >>> had a right to whip his wife with a switch no larger than his thumb."
Buller's "thumbstick" opinion and the three American rulings Fenick found >>> were intriguing -- and damning -- but did not constitute definitive proof >>> that the rule of thumb was derived from British common law.
As Fenick, encouraged by a law professor, considered publishing her
findings, she found that Henry Ansgar Kelly, a University of California
English professor, had beaten her to the punch. His "Rule of Thumb and the >>> Folklaw of the Husband's Stick" appeared in the September 1994 Journal of >>> Legal Education.
Kelly, much to Fenick's disappointment, had covered the same territory as >>> she. (Although she proudly observes that his article overlooked the earliest
reference to "rule of thumb" by Coghill.) Three and half years later, Safire
would rely entirely on Kelly's article to make his case in his column.
Fenick's efforts were not in vain, however. In response to a query from a >>> correspondent to the alt.folkore.urban newsgroup linked to the Urban Legends
Web site, Fenick posted her article where it is now part of the site's
permanent archives. Since its inception, the site has expanded its mission >>> from probing the genesis and spread of urban legends to "confirming or
disproving beliefs and facts of all kinds, including origin of vernacular."
"Rule of thumb" and other figures of speech can work much the same way that >>> urban legends do: They may appear mysteriously, spread spontaneously and >>> contain elements of humor or horror. And, like urban legends, a figure of >>> speech may contain a grain of emotional, if not actual, truth.
Thus it was easy at first for Fenick and others to believe that the "rule of
thumb" was founded in common law. Patricia A. Turner, a University of
California at Davis folklorist, well understands how a falsehood can acquire
the mantle of truth.
In "I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture," >>> Turner examines the way allegations of forced birth control, corporate
collusion with the Ku Klux Klan, drug distribution targeted at urban areas >>> and other anti-black conspiracy theories circulating in the African-American
community are based on racist realities and serve as a form of resistance >>> against white oppression.
The same theory can be applied to the rule of thumb, Turner says. A text may
be proved to be inaccurate or false, but "if it reflects some deeper truth >>> in society, it doesn't go away." The term "rule of thumb" may "not have that
specific etymological origin, but men have dominated women in workplaces and
in homes and in virtually every setting. It speaks to a deeper truth."
Students of women's history who want to research possibly apocryphal ideas >>> are also at a disadvantage because they "don't have the paper trail that >>> more mainstream areas of academic discipline have," Turner says. "Sometimes >>> it's more difficult to get to the bottom of something."
That said, Turner acknowledges that it is "very sloppy for an academic to >>> pass on misinformation." Once a theory such as the inaccurate history of the
"rule of thumb" has been debunked, it can backfire on those promoting it, >>> she says. "If someone has read it who knows it is false, everything gets >>> discredited on that level. So based on one falsehood, a whole history can be
challenged."
That is what concerned scholars and social critics say happened when
Christina Hoff Sommers debunked the "rule of thumb" in her 1994 book, "Who >>> Stole Feminism? How Women have Betrayed Women." Sommers finds the earliest >>> misuse of the phrase in a 1976 National Organization for Women report and >>> uses it to bolster her case against domestic-violence statistics.
The feminist rush to brandish the "rule of thumb" as justification for their
crusade, Turner suggests, may inadvertently have provided Sommers and her >>> sympathizers with the ideal ammunition to discredit the same cause.
As for Fenick, she received a nice letter from Kelly, who learned RTC of her
research after the Safire piece ran. She has written him back, and hopes to >>> hear soon what he thinks about her Coghill reference.
Pub Date: 4/17/98
----------------------------------------------------
Found in my drafts file, worth archiving.
Again, excellent read....
"Earl Browder" wrote in message
news:4c381c37-c066-4a68-be08-34f3c04ecc3a@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
Will Dockery wrote:
Michael Pendragon wrote:
Let's all talk about Bob
Dylan, Patti Smith, Lenny Cohen".
We can leave Dylan out for now, since you prefer it, but both Smith and >>> > Cohen were poets, published poets, long before they became involved with >>> > music:
So, Michael Pendragon and his ignorance about Leonard Cohen is long standing, one error of his that seems as uncorrectable as Jim Senetto and his apostrophe disability.
And so it goes.
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Patti_Smith
"Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946)[1] is an American >>> > poet, singer-songwriter, and visual artist..."
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Leonard_Cohen
"Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (September 21, 1934 - November 7, 2016) >>> > was
a Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, musician, and novelist. His work
often
explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal
relationships..."
I'm with Stuart on this one. Folk rock and poetry are entirely
different categories. You and your friends seem to think that
excluding
folkies from the title of "poet" constitutes some sort of negative,
qualitative judgement. It is nothing of the sort. Bob Dylan is a
highly influential folkie. He's not a good poet. He's not a bad
poet.
He's not a poet at all.
Everywhere but you says Dylan is a poet:
https://pennyspoetry.wikia.com/wiki/Bob_Dylan
"Bob Dylan (born May 24, 1941) is an American poet, singer-songwriter, >>> > musician, and painter..."
Rule of Thumb:
If a song lyric can stand on its own, it's poetry.
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You're an English expert, Michael...
Do you know why the phrase "rule of thumb" is offensive to a great number >>> of
people?
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1998-04-17/news/1998107056_1_rule-of-thumb-phrase-rule-false-etymology
The misunderstood 'rule of thumb'
Misconception: Many feminists for years thought the phrase "rule of thumb" >> referred to British common law's tolerance of wife-beating.
Sun Journal, April 17, 1998|By Stephanie Shapiro | Stephanie Shapiro,SUN
STAFF
Sharon Fenick first heard the figure of speech "rule of thumb" cited as a
sexist pejorative during her freshman year at Harvard seven years ago.
The phrase was invoked in a lecture as an example of domestic abuse
permitted by British common law. The rule of thumb, according to the
professor, was a law that allowed a man to beat his wife so long as the rod >> used was no thicker than his thumb. But over the centuries, the term had
evolved into vernacular for an "approximate measure."
"It sounded very believable to me," says the 24-year-old Fenick, now in her >> third year of law school at the University of Chicago. "I was having my
first contact with feminist thought and [the explanation] was very
impressive to me. It was one of those things I really remember that spread >> around. I can't remember when I found out it wasn't true."
Unlike Fenick, untold historians, feminists and legal experts are unaware
that the folk etymology for "rule of thumb" is false. For them, the notion >> of a "rule of thumb" makes perfect sense, originating as it allegedly does >> from a legal system they see as misogynistic.
In January, wordsmith William Safire debunked "the rule of thumb's" false
etymology in his New York Times Magazine column. The phrase had been called >> to his attention by the president of George Washington University, where a >> female student had denounced its use by an administrator remarking on budget >> problems in the student newspaper.
In gender- and women's-studies courses across the country, the phrase is
still cited as an example of unconscious acceptance and tacit condoning of >> sexist policy. A computer search for the use of "rule of thumb" and "wife" >> in the same newspaper sentence reveals many letters to the editor in recent >> years from women irate about the casual appearance of the figure of speech >> in news articles. In a televised news analysis about domestic violence in
1994, even commentator Cokie Roberts noted the misconception.
The false etymology persists despite the Oxford English Dictionary
definition: "A method or procedure derived entirely from practice or
experience, without any basis in scientific knowledge; a roughly practical >> method." The OED dates the phrase's first reference to 1692.
In the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, "rule of thumb" is
additionally defined as a method by which brewers once tested the
temperature of a batch of beer: They dipped a thumb in the brew.
During her first year of law school, Fenick, a wordsmith herself, was
determined to unravel the history of the "rule of thumb." Did the phrase
stem from a specific rule? Was there such a rule? Even if there wasn't a
rule, did an infamous judge's ruling establish "thumbstick" guidelines for >> would-be wife beaters?
She discovered that while "rule of thumb" was not accepted law, there was
evidence aplenty that the British legal system and the American legal system >> it inspired were unkind to women. "I found out that in the 1800s [wife
beating] really was a debatable proposition," she says.
Wife beating is acknowledged in Blackstone's "Commentaries," and many court >> rulings sanctioned the practice. But whether the "rule of thumb" was
accepted as law was a separate matter.
Fenick traced the earliest possible reference to the 17th century, when one >> Dr. Marmaduke Coghill, an Irish judge, held that a man who had beaten his
wife "with such a switch as the one he held in his hand" was within his
matrimonial privilege.
In the 18th century a judge named Francis Buller, dubbed "Judge Thumb" by
the famous caricaturist James Gillray, was said to have allowed that a man >> could beat his wife, as long as the punitive stick was no thicker than his >> thumb. (A witty countess was said to have asked the judge to measure her
husband's thumb exactly, so that she might know the precise extent of his
privilege.)
Fenick also found three 19th-century cases in America that mention the "rule >> of thumb," including an 1868 ruling in North Carolina that "the defendant
had a right to whip his wife with a switch no larger than his thumb."
Buller's "thumbstick" opinion and the three American rulings Fenick found
were intriguing -- and damning -- but did not constitute definitive proof
that the rule of thumb was derived from British common law.
As Fenick, encouraged by a law professor, considered publishing her
findings, she found that Henry Ansgar Kelly, a University of California
English professor, had beaten her to the punch. His "Rule of Thumb and the >> Folklaw of the Husband's Stick" appeared in the September 1994 Journal of
Legal Education.
Kelly, much to Fenick's disappointment, had covered the same territory as
she. (Although she proudly observes that his article overlooked the earliest >> reference to "rule of thumb" by Coghill.) Three and half years later, Safire >> would rely entirely on Kelly's article to make his case in his column.
Fenick's efforts were not in vain, however. In response to a query from a
correspondent to the alt.folkore.urban newsgroup linked to the Urban Legends >> Web site, Fenick posted her article where it is now part of the site's
permanent archives. Since its inception, the site has expanded its mission >> from probing the genesis and spread of urban legends to "confirming or
disproving beliefs and facts of all kinds, including origin of vernacular."
"Rule of thumb" and other figures of speech can work much the same way that >> urban legends do: They may appear mysteriously, spread spontaneously and
contain elements of humor or horror. And, like urban legends, a figure of
speech may contain a grain of emotional, if not actual, truth.
Thus it was easy at first for Fenick and others to believe that the "rule of >> thumb" was founded in common law. Patricia A. Turner, a University of
California at Davis folklorist, well understands how a falsehood can acquire >> the mantle of truth.
In "I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture,"
Turner examines the way allegations of forced birth control, corporate
collusion with the Ku Klux Klan, drug distribution targeted at urban areas >> and other anti-black conspiracy theories circulating in the African-American >> community are based on racist realities and serve as a form of resistance
against white oppression.
The same theory can be applied to the rule of thumb, Turner says. A text may >> be proved to be inaccurate or false, but "if it reflects some deeper truth >> in society, it doesn't go away." The term "rule of thumb" may "not have that >> specific etymological origin, but men have dominated women in workplaces and >> in homes and in virtually every setting. It speaks to a deeper truth."
Students of women's history who want to research possibly apocryphal ideas >> are also at a disadvantage because they "don't have the paper trail that
more mainstream areas of academic discipline have," Turner says. "Sometimes >> it's more difficult to get to the bottom of something."
That said, Turner acknowledges that it is "very sloppy for an academic to
pass on misinformation." Once a theory such as the inaccurate history of the >> "rule of thumb" has been debunked, it can backfire on those promoting it,
she says. "If someone has read it who knows it is false, everything gets
discredited on that level. So based on one falsehood, a whole history can be >> challenged."
That is what concerned scholars and social critics say happened when
Christina Hoff Sommers debunked the "rule of thumb" in her 1994 book, "Who >> Stole Feminism? How Women have Betrayed Women." Sommers finds the earliest >> misuse of the phrase in a 1976 National Organization for Women report and
uses it to bolster her case against domestic-violence statistics.
The feminist rush to brandish the "rule of thumb" as justification for their >> crusade, Turner suggests, may inadvertently have provided Sommers and her
sympathizers with the ideal ammunition to discredit the same cause.
As for Fenick, she received a nice letter from Kelly, who learned RTC of her >> research after the Safire piece ran. She has written him back, and hopes to >> hear soon what he thinks about her Coghill reference.
Pub Date: 4/17/98
Found in my drafts file, worth archiving.
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
Like I've said before, if it is sickly sweet and sappy... it is probably a Pat Boone song.
HTH and HAND.
🙂
Will Dockery wrote:
"Michael Pendragon" wrote in message
news:4e279b72-7458-4417-92c4-19f66dcdb435@googlegroups.com...
If it can be sung in a nasally voice, it's a folk song.
Like I've said before, if it is sickly sweet and sappy... it is probably a Pat Boone song.
HTH and HAND.
🙂
Pat Boone is pretty dismal listening, usually... but...
I love this one from P.B.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSpj3l-_MQY
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