Rules of Thumb

An interesting invitation from the good people at Comment:

Dear friends,

Sometime in October we hope to publish online a compendium of contributions from the authors and artists in the Comment community, on the theme “Rules of thumb.” We are looking for very short statements of practical wisdom that you use and are willing to stand by, based on your own experience or oral traditions in your communities-preferably summarized in the form of a one-sentence saying.

The inspiration for this invitation lies in… Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog where he published a small collection of such rules by Tom Parker: www.rulesofthumb.org/about.

What is your rule of thumb?

Post Script: Until recently I hated the term ‘rule of thumb’ because I believed it referred to an old law ruling husbands could not beat their wife with anything wider than their thumb. This article claims to debunk the theory, yet others hold it fast. Does anyone else know about this? The term still makes me uneasy; it’s all those years of Women’s Studies…