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Cartoon by James Gillray satirizing Sir Francis Buller, 1782: "Judge Thumb; or, Patent Sticks for Family Correction: Warranted Lawful!". A modern folk etymology [14] relates the phrase to domestic violence via an alleged rule under English common law which permitted wife-beating provided that the implement used was a rod or stick no thicker than a man's thumb. [6]
Ordinary least squares regression of Okun's law.Since the regression line does not miss any of the points by very much, the R 2 of the regression is relatively high.. In statistics, the coefficient of determination, denoted R 2 or r 2 and pronounced "R squared", is the proportion of the variation in the dependent variable that is predictable from the independent variable(s).
An 1857 version of the idiom is "It would freeze the tail off a brass monkey", and probably refers to a common type of tourist souvenir. [42] Rule of thumb is not derived from a medieval constraint on the thickness of an object with which one might beat one's wife. [43] [44] More likely it means that the thumb can be used to measure an ...
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).
For example, if the finesse would land in the hand of the dangerous opponent who can give the other opponent a ruff that declarer cannot afford, with eight cards they might have to play for a "drop" by playing the ace and king then a small one to the jack.
An idiom dictionary may be a traditional book or expressed in another medium such as a database within software for machine translation.Examples of the genre include Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which explains traditional allusions and proverbs, and Fowler's Modern English Usage, which was conceived as an idiom dictionary following the completion of the Concise Oxford English ...
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A proverbial phrase or expression is a type of conventional saying similar to a proverb and transmitted by oral tradition. The difference is that a proverb is a fixed expression, while a proverbial phrase permits alterations to fit the grammar of the context. [1] [2] In 1768, John Ray defined a proverbial phrase as: