rules-of-the-thumb

Updated: May 11, 2025

Nor was the vision of the inspired Big Business that shall be, to be found in the books over which Una labored the flat, maroon-covered, dusty, commercial geography, the arid book of phrases and rules-of-the-thumb called "Fish's Commercial English," the manual of touch-typewriting, or the shorthand primer that, with its grotesque symbols and numbered exercises and yellow pages dog-eared by many owners, looked like an old-fashioned Arabic grammar headachily perused in some divinity-school library.

Sinclair Lewis - The Job: An American Novel