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What's something you used to do/see/say but don't anymore because you don't feel it's right? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Me personally? I've become much less tolerant of sexist humor. Back in the day, cracking a joke at women's expense was pretty common when I was a teen. As I've matured and become aware to the horrific extent of toxicity and bigotry pervading all tiers of our individualistic society, I've come to see how exclusionarly and objectifying that sort of 'humor' really is, and I regret it deeply.

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[-] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

"Rule of thumb" I quit using this one after learning that it referred to a rule where you could legally beat your wife with a switch no wider than your thumb.

"Getting gyped" Learned this one is about associating gypsies with getting screwed over, so people started saying they got gyped because something bad happened.

Stuff I thought was completely innocuous but turns out has really bad connotations, so I dropped them.

[-] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I respect your intuition to drop problematic phrases but you may have been lead astray on "rule of thumb" by a very common rumour (Wikipedia calls it 'modern folk etymology') that that is where it originated.

In fact no law ever existed and it was more used in trades as thumbs were an easy mode of measurement available to anyone (similar to the use of feet to measure!)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thumb

The Wikipedia article even explains the "switch" rumour and provides some backstory and explanation to it.

So don't feel weird using Rule of Thumb; it has more to do with carpentry than anything else.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

never heard of that, really neat

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this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023

581 points (92.2% liked)

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