Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
It’s actually only recently that I discovered what “the exception that proves the rule” actually means, and the more I think about it, the weirder it is that for so long, I just accepted the way most people (incorrectly) (including me before now) use that phrase.
People tend to use it to basically mean, “I have a freebie to reject one (1) example that would otherwise weaken my point, and act like it actually strengthens my point.” If I say, “X is always Y,” and someone gives an example of a case where X is not Y, I can just nod sagely and say, “Ah, but that’s the exception that proves the rule,” and everyone just accepts that that’s A Thing.
That… makes no sense! Being proven wrong about something being universal doesn’t somehow make you more right.
And the REASON it doesn’t make sense is: *That’s not what ‘exception that proves the rule’ means.*
“The exception that proves the rule” means that if someone has gone out of their way to make an official exception to a rule, it indicates that the rule exists in the first place, even if we don’t have direct evidence of the rule. This can be particularly useful in, for example, the study of history. If you unearth some ancient tablets that say, “Let it be here decreed that on festival days, men shall be permitted to approach the Temple of the Goddess without covering their heads,” that’s evidence that a man going to that particular temple without covering his head wouldn’t normally be allowed. Maybe we haven’t found the tablet yet that says that. Maybe this civilisation never even bothered to write down that you can’t go to the Temple of the Goddess bare-headed, because it was so obvious to them. But the fact that the exception exists means the rule must have existed.
