Urban legend.
(Wiki)
The earliest citation comes from Sir William Hope’s The Compleat Fencing-Master, second edition, 1692, page 157: "What he doth, he doth by rule of thumb, and not by art."[3] The term is thought to originate with wood workers who used the length of their thumbs rather than rulers for measuring things.
It is often claimed that the term originally referred to a law that limited the maximum thickness of a stick with which it was permissible for a man to beat his wife, but this has been fully discredited.
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When people ask what I hope to see before I die, I answer that I've already seen too much.
Last edited by jtur88; May 4th, 2008 at 06:44 AM.
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