Wyn Drabble: Digging into a few more expressions

Wyn Drabble delves further into the origins of expressions. Photo / NZME

Last week the bogus entry was “rub the wrong way”. It seems the two most accepted explanations for this expression are related to cats and floors.

Rubbing a cat’s fur the wrong way can annoy it and, in colonial USA, domestic staff would be castigated for cleaning the floor one way and then not drying it the other way. Or something like that. Take your pick.

My facts about the eraser were correct – the inventor and the date – but they were not related to the expression. I put the true stuff in as a red herring and, if I was successful at throwing you off the scent, I might even start writing detective novels.

Which begs the question: where did “red herring” come from? The most plausible explanation I could find (without digging too deeply) was that herrings turn reddish-brown when preserved by smoking. They are also a bit whiffy so could be used to divert and distract hounds from chasing a rabbit.

“Cut and dried” has a number of possible explanations. One is that it refers to herbs ready to sell at a market - but from frontier America comes the suggestion that it might involve cutting and drying meat to make jerky, which keeps well. I’m afraid the second option doesn’t cut the mustard with me.

A good rule of thumb in the modern world is not to believe things just because they are on the internet, which raises the question of the origin of the phrase “rule of thumb”. Well, would you believe The Guardian has covered this very topic and a lot of learned readers shared their views.

The explanation which stimulated the debate was that it derives from an archaic English law forbidding a man from beating his wife with a stick that was thicker than his thumb. As you can probably imagine, that rubbed a lot of readers the wrong way though it could well have been a fictitious red herring simply designed to stimulate debate.

Apparently, before Charles II, a man was permitted to give “moderate correction” to his wife! Let’s move swiftly on.

The explanation I liked most was that it came from medieval times. Medieval millers, it claimed, would rub their grain between thumb and finger to determine whether it was yet fine enough or whether it needed further grinding.

Another medieval offering was that the thumb was used as a unit of measure. An inch was defined as the breadth of a man’s thumb at the base of the nail. Precision was obviously not as important as it is today.

There was even an explanation from the world of seafaring. Maps were not as accurate as they are today – possibly because of the use of a thumb as an inch – and mariners who believed there might be submerged rocks to avoid placed their thumb on the map and used that width as a safety margin when plotting a course.

There is also a brewing variant; dipping one’s thumb into the brewing vat to check the heat was as required. I suppose it works on the same principle as dipping your elbow into the baby’s bath to check the water is at the right temperature though, strictly speaking, that should be called a rule of elbow.

If someone from the Middle Ages could time travel to today, I wonder what he or she might think.

Medieval Time Traveller: I’m loving the fast food and fast cars but I hope I’m not rubbing you the wrong way if I say we could have created those ourselves given time. However, I don’t think our wandering, lute-playing troubadours could ever match lyrics like “Oo-ee, oo-ah-ah, ting-tang walla walla bing bang.”

Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, musician and public speaker.